OPINION: Daniel Bwala’s insults on Al Jazeera

I barely know Daniel Bwala. He became the center of national media attention in 2022 due to his strong opposition to Kashim Shettima’s choice as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public outspokenness from the APC, he appears to me to be a chatterbox, ignorant and opportunist, not because of his attitude towards Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim running mate, but because of what I think is his looseness and self-serving obsession.

His dramatic visage, from the vicious Tinubu critic to the cruel and fawning Tinubu batterer, has proven that my hunch about him was accurate.

But I felt sorry to see him being eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera on Friday, March 6. He willingly participated in blowing up what little credibility he had left before the world. In the process, he inflicted incalculable reputational damage on the very Tinubu government he was tasked with protecting.

What viewers see in Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head is the spectacle of a presidential spokesman arriving unarmed into a firefight he should have anticipated, then trying to counter with nervous laughter, evasions, amnesia, and the Nigerian official’s long-standing retreat about what happened.

His evasions and falsehoods were so obvious that Hasan was forced to say, “Over the weekend, you put out a music video showing you and your team researching and preparing for this show and…now every time I ask, you say you didn’t realize….what were you researching in that video…?”

The most striking thing about Bwala’s performance was not that he faced a tough challenge. Anyone who agrees to sit across from Mehdi Hasan knows that the interview is not a tea party. What’s embarrassing is that Bwala seems shocked by the fact that he should have mastered it before entering the studio.

On insecurity, corruption, Tinubu’s own words, and even his previous statements, he oscillates between denial, deflection, and a kind of verbal dismissal that makes the government look smaller than its critics say.

The problem isn’t that Daniel Bwala looks lazy or unprepared. In fact, he looked ready, even having practiced thoroughly and robotically. He has the posture, confidence, and choreographed mannerisms of a man who believes he has done his homework. But his carefully planned performance fails miserably when it collides with Hasan’s hard, cold, irrefutable facts.

Political puns can sometimes persist on friendly platforms or in tame Nigerian media spaces where statements are misconstrued as arguments. It cannot withstand fact-based, scorched-earth, uninhibited, and uninhibited interrogation.

Facts are facts. And Mehdi Hasan is a man of facts. He had a rare talent for making heavy, devastating facts sound light in conversation. That quality makes Bwala’s dodging all the more painful to watch.

The “context” exchange illustrates this perfectly. When faced with evidence that insecurity is worsening under the current government, Bwala returned to the slogan that “context matters.” But the context he uses is nothing more than a haze of semantics and deliberate, contrived verbal confusion.

Instead, Hasan uses figures and reports that any government spokesperson should be familiar with. The moment becomes absurd when Bwala insists that the context of the worsening statistics is that things are not getting worse. This dialogue is worth reproducing:

Hasan: You failed. Amnesty International says you are failing on security. The numbers don’t lie.

Bwala: It is very unfortunate and as a government that works day and night in such situations. I do not agree [sic] the fact that things are getting worse.

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Hasan: How can it not get worse if more people die in one year than in the previous year?

Bwala: Context is important.

Hasan: What is the context?

Bwala: The context doesn’t get any worse.

Hassan: What!

Bwala: Yes.

Hasan: The context doesn’t get worse?

Bwala: The context is that it doesn’t get any worse, because you see this is water [sic]Right?….

Forget, for the moment, Bwala’s abysmal grammar, especially for a lawyer, his excruciating logic, and his hilarious articulation. It was a feeling of horror at oneself.

The figures he is trying to dispel are not the fabrication of hostile foreigners with an anti-Nigerian agenda. The National Commission on Human Rights in Nigeria reported that at least 2,266 people were killed by bandits or insurgents in the first half of 2025 alone.

Conflict monitoring groups recorded even higher numbers for the full year. Amnesty International has repeatedly warned that violence has increased since Tinubu took office. In other words, Hasan’s central point is simply a documented summary of reality.

This is what makes Bwala’s performance so bad. He doesn’t just debate interpretations. He took issue with the arithmetic. When a spokesperson tells the world that things are not getting any worse while credible data suggests they are, he insults the intelligence of everyone who listens, especially Nigerians who bury their dead, pay ransoms, pull their children from schools and avoid the roads at night.

But the most morally satisfying aspect of the interview is Hasan’s methodical refutation of Bwala’s denials of his past statements. Bwala is trying a trite and boring trick of Nigerian politics by pretending that statements made by the opposition are in a separate moral realm from statements made in office. Hasan didn’t let him get away with it.

Bwala denied on air that Tinubu and his camp were forming a militia and threatening him. However, the statement was widely reported during the 2023 campaign. He also denied saying that the gold bullion van seen at Tinubu’s residence in Bourdillon was allegedly to buy votes, despite the fact that the comment was made by some media in Nigeria at the time. So, when Bwala asked who said such a thing, the answer was very simple. Daniel Bwala said it.

The same pattern also occurs with corruption. Tinubu actually stated at a public event that Nigeria had “no more corruption,” a line that was widely reported and widely mocked and provoked Omoyele Sowore to call Tinubu a “criminal” and he is on trial now.

Bwala’s attempt to salvage the statement by retroactively creating a narrower meaning is not the contextual clarification he desired. That’s a complete lie.

Regarding the appointment of Abubakar Bagudu as Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Bwala was again evasive. But the record is clear that Bagudu returned about $163 million related to the Abacha looting investigation in a settlement with authorities. Regardless of whether one calls it a punishment or not, the public controversy surrounding his appointment cannot honestly be dismissed as drunken rumours.

Then there’s the overarching irony that punctures the interview. Bwala was confronted with the fossil record of his own mouth. Before joining Tinubu’s camp, he publicly attacked the same people over allegations of corruption, the drug seizure case in the United States, and the gold bullion van episode. What Hasan reveals is the speed with which partisan passions digest previous beliefs and cause indigestion to develop.

Bwala’s performance is important for reasons bigger than one person’s embarrassment. This is seen in the concentrated form of the ills that beset Nigerian political communications.

Too many spokespeople believe that their job is not to illuminate but to survive the segment. So, they deny what is documented, laugh nervously when pushed into a corner, compare Nigeria to unrelated countries, misuse the word “context” and hope that shamelessness will make preparation work impossible.

Daniel Bwala went to London to defend the government. Instead, he displays his worst habits: contempt for evidence, indifference to contradictions and the assumption that society’s memory is so short that one can refute one’s own words without consequence.

Mehdi Hasan did not embarrass him. Bwala did it himself. Hasan only kept the receipt.

By: Farooq A. Kperogi