*"SPEECH IS THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL; AS A MAN SPEAKS, SO HE IS." - Publilius Syrus*


By: Gizo jnr Kuulyidamsu 
A public Affairs analyst 
September 25,2026

I listened to Vice President Kashim Shettima at the 81st UNGA expecting the voice of 230 million Nigerians. What I heard instead was an academic exercise in verbal gymnastics.

Aprika. Aprika. Aprika.

For a full 15 minutes, I genuinely thought he had coined a new geopolitical doctrine called "Aprikanism" - until it dawned on me he was trying to pronounce Africa, but with a borrowed accent that even the interpreters could not decode.

Let us call it what it was: *Style without substance. Grammar without gravitas.*

Every other African President who mounted that podium - from Ruto to Ramaphosa to Kagame to Faye - spoke with fire. They spoke about their people's hunger, their debt, their youth, their wars. They spoke like men whose feet were in the mud of their nations. They earned standing ovations. They commanded the room.

Shettima? He read.

He read a beautiful, soulless, ChatGPT-assisted essay. Paragraph after paragraph of everything and nothing. UN reform... climate finance... artificial intelligence... debt sustainability... - a buffet of buzzwords served cold, without salt, without soul, without a single pause for humanity.

I watched the cameras pan to the audience. Delegates were scrolling. Some were sleeping. There was no crescendo. No punchline. No moment where you felt Nigeria - the Giant of Africa - had entered the building. If you were in that hall and blinked, you would have missed that Nigeria spoke at all.

Ask yourself a simple test of great oratory: What is ONE line you remember from his speech?

If you cannot remember, it did not happen. And it didn't.

To be charitable - and I will be charitable - he was set up to fail. How do you prepare a world-stage address when your principal, President Bola Tinubu, allegedly tips you off less than 48 hours to departure that he cannot make it because of the ghost of his FBI drug forfeiture files haunting him again in Washington? 

48 hours to write what other leaders spent months crafting. 48 hours to become the voice of a failing state.

So he did what every desperate student does before an exam he didn't read for: He threw big words at the paper and prayed the examiner would be impressed.

But here is what hurts me most as a Nigerian taxpayer: We chartered jets. We booked suites at Pierre Hotel - $15,000 per night. We paid estacodes for 50 aides who followed him to New York to clap on cue. We burned hundreds of millions of naira for a 15-minute Aprika symphony that left no trace.

What a colossal waste of scarce resources in a country where 133 million people are multi-dimensionally poor. What a tragic metaphor for this government itself: Expensive flight to nowhere.

*"EMPTY VESSELS MAKE THE MOST NOISE."*

And in this case, the most expensive noise.

No wonder the President himself could not show up.

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