You cannot miss the K when you see the Vice President.
Look closely the next time Kashim Shettima appears on your screen. You will find it there: woven around the circumference of his Zanna cap (the dense, hand-stitched northern cap) is a single recurring letter K for Kashim.
Like Joseph’s biblical coat, it comes in many colours: navy, cream, wine or charcoal. But the K always goes around and around the cap, and the style has spread across his harem of aides, too. But sometimes the K is not constant. The VP also sports a Tonak cap. At other times, he wears a Zanna without the K-pattern. But when the K is there, you cannot miss it.
I began noticing it about two years in. The cap fits him well, I must admit. Whoever pitched the idea to the Vice President (and I suspect it happened on one of his trips home to Borno, where the Zanna cap is practically a second skin) understood something about power that the rest of us only learn slowly.
The “pitcher” understood that if the principal wears the cap, an army of aides will follow. It was a flawless prediction. Today, you can hardly throw a stone in the Vice President’s wing of the Villa without it bouncing off a K cap.
Now, let me be clear: there is nothing wrong with a fine cap. A fine cap is almost as good as smelling nice. In Nigeria’s political arena, however, caps are never just fabric and style. They mean something.
Psychologists have a name for this. They call it the chameleon effect: the unconscious human habit of mimicking the gestures, speech and style of the people we love, admire or revere. Although several researchers have explored this phenomenon, Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh are known to have first put a name to it in their seminal 1999 study titled The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behaviour Link and Social Interaction.
According to them, we do it to belong. We do it to signal, “I am with you, I am one of you, I understand.” Further studies have found that such mimicry helps keep communities tight and safe. In other words, an aide who shows up in his or her principal’s cap is making a safe social bet. Nobody was ever punished for trying to look like the big boss. If anything, they are rewarded.
This trend surely did not begin with Shettima, and it will not end with him. When Muhammadu Buhari assumed office, it suddenly became fashionable to wear a kaftan with a crisp white round-neck collar peeking out from the collarless robe. Some called it the Daura style or the Buhari look. Aides wore it. Commissioners wore it. Men whose farthest journey north ended in Abuja also wore it.
While that was happening, the Awo caps worn by Prof. Yemi Osinbajo became the default headgear in the VP wing of the Villa, until nearly every aide could honestly say he had worn one at some point.
And then there is President Bola Tinubu’s branded cap. Stamped with his now-famous infinity insignia, the looping mark has become the single most coveted accessory in Nigerian politics today. Almost anyone who wants to get anywhere near the president keeps one or two in a safe locker. Aides wear it. Governors wear it. Senators wear it. And in a trend I did not see coming, Tinubu’s loyalists did not restrict his insignia to the Yoruba fila alone. They smeared it onto the northern Zanna cap, too. I have also seen it on the signature red caps from the Southeast. Loyalty, it appears, can be expressed in any language.
But some loyalists also carve a niche within the niche. On the President’s state visit to the United Kingdom in March, photographs emerged of the Defence Minister, General Christopher Gwabin Musa, in a Zanna cap bearing the initials GCGM. The man took his monogram all the way to Windsor.
If you think this is a peculiarly Nigerian condition, I have news for you. At COP28 in Dubai in late 2023, I watched the Tanzanian delegation walking through the blue zone, and almost every woman in the group wore the same veil as their President, Samia Suluhu Hassan. In India, it was the Nehru jacket, revived and rebranded as the “Modi jacket.” It is now dutifully copied by state BJP leaders across the country.
However, the troubling implication of wardrobe sycophancy is that many incompetent elements and persons of questionable character take refuge behind it. Dressing like the big man almost washes away your sins and makes your loyalty shine brighter than the terrible job you are doing.
Beyond watching who dresses like them, leaders must measure loyalty by who is truly delivering on their KPIs. And no one can stem this excess except the leader himself. It is more honourable and profitable to redirect people’s loyalty to the nation rather than to a personality, because personalities come and go, but the nation is the only Constant (K).
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