Nigeria’s Tinubu picks Muslim senator as presidential running mate

LAGOS (Reuters) – Nigeria’s presidential frontrunner Bola Tinubu on Sunday picked as his operating mate a sitting Muslim senator and former governor of northeastern Borno state, the heartland of an Islamist insurgency that has killed and displaced hundreds of individuals.

The transfer by Tinubu, who can be Muslim, breaks with previous follow the place presidential candidates from main political events have chosen operating mates from a special faith in a bid to foster unity within the nation.

Tinubu, 70, was final month elected because the ruling All Progressives Congress get together’s candidate to succeed incumbent Muhammadu Buhari, who will step down subsequent 12 months after finishing two phrases.

A Yoruba Muslim from southwestern Nigeria, Tinubu instructed reporters after assembly Buhari in northern Katsina state that he had chosen Kashim Shettima, 55, to be his presidential operating mate.

By choosing Shettima, Tinubu can also be on the lookout for a deputy broadly acceptable to powerbrokers within the north, which is a big voting block.

“He’s competent, succesful, dependable and ready,” Tinubu mentioned.

Atiku Abubakar, the principle opposition candidate and Tinubu’s principal rival, is a northern Muslim who has picked a Christian operating mate from the south.

Because the finish of navy rule in 1999, Nigeria has adopted an unwritten rule the place energy is shared between the largely Muslim north and primarily Christian south.

Rising insecurity shall be a significant election concern subsequent 12 months. A decade-long Islamist insurgency and assaults and kidnappings for ransom by armed gangs principally within the northwest are a number of the main safety challenges.

Throughout Shettima’s 2011-2019 governorship, Borno state grabbed international headlines when Boko Haram militants kidnapped greater than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok neighborhood in April 2014.

Shettima was amongst those that supported the discharge of low-risk detainees caught up within the authorities’s battle in opposition to insurgents, as a good-will gesture.

(Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Enhancing by Hugh Lawson)