*Daniel Bwala’s Al Jazeera humiliation
I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 because of his impassioned opposition to the choice of Kashim Shettima as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public break from the APC, he came across to me as a voluble, ignorant and opportunistic careerist, not because of his stance on Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim running mate, but because of what struck me as his facileness and self-seeking obsessions.
His dramatic volte-face from being a virulent Tinubu critic to a fawning, vicious Tinubu battering ram has proven that my hunch about him was accurate.
Yet I felt sorry watching him eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera on Friday, March 6. He willingly participated in the detonation of what remained of his credibility before the world. In the process, he did incalculable reputational damage to the Tinubu government he is paid to protect.
What viewers saw on Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head was the spectacle of a presidential spokesman arriving unarmed to a firefight he should have anticipated, then trying to fight back with nervous laughter, evasions, amnesia and the old Nigerian official fallback of whataboutery.
His evasiveness and prevarications were so unnervingly apparent that Hasan was compelled to say, “At the weekend, you put out a video to music of you and your team researching and prepping for this show and…now every time I ask you say you are not aware of that….what were you researching in that video…?”
The most striking thing about Bwala’s performance was not that he was challenged hard. Anyone who agrees to sit opposite Mehdi Hasan knows the interview will not be a tea party. The disgrace was that Bwala looked startled by facts he should have mastered before stepping into the studio.
On insecurity, on corruption, on Tinubu’s own words and even on his own prior statements, he oscillated between denial, deflection and the sort of desperate verbal stalling that makes a government look smaller than its critics claim it is.
The problem was not that Daniel Bwala appeared lazy or obviously unprepared. In fact, he looked prepared, even thoroughly rehearsed and robotic. He had the posture, the confidence and the choreographed mannerisms of a man who believed he had done his homework. But his carefully planned performances collapsed pitifully when they collided with Hasan’s hard, cold, indisputable facts.
Facts are facts. And Mehdi Hasan is a man of facts. He has the rare gift of making heavy, devastating facts sound almost light in conversation. That quality made Bwala’s evasions even more painful to watch.
The exchange over “context” illustrated this perfectly. When confronted with evidence that insecurity had worsened under the current administration, Bwala retreated to the mantra that “context matters.” Yet the context he invoked was little more than semantic fog and intentional, self-impressed verbal obfuscation.
Hasan, by contrast, used numbers and reports that any government spokesman worth the title should already know. The moment became absurd when Bwala insisted that the context of worsening statistics was that things were not getting worse.
*Culled from Tribune.
