I was sad to see Daniel Bwala eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera – Farooq Kperogi

*Humiliation of Daniel Bwala by Al Jazeera

I barely know Daniel Bwala. He came to the forefront of national media attention in 2022 due to his passionate opposition to the choice of Kashim Shettima as Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s running mate. But beyond his public break with the APC, he struck me as a loquacious, ignorant and opportunistic careerist, not because of his stance on Tinubu’s choice of a Muslim candidate as his presidential candidate, but because of what struck me as his ease and selfish obsessions.

His dramatic turnaround from a virulent critic of Tinubu to a servile and ferocious battering ram of Tinubu proved that my impression of him was correct.

Yet I was sad to see him eaten alive by Mehdi Hassan on Al Jazeera on Friday 6 March. He willingly participated in the detonation of what remained of his credibility before the world. In doing so, he has caused incalculable damage to the reputation of the Tinubu government which he is paid to protect.

What viewers saw in Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head was the spectacle of a presidential spokesman arriving unarmed at a firefight he should have foreseen, then trying to respond with nervous laughter, evasions, amnesia and the old Nigerian official fallback of nonsense.

His evasiveness and prevarications were so disturbingly obvious that Hasan was forced to say: “Over the weekend, you put a video to music of you and your team researching and preparing for this show and… now every time I ask you to say you’re not aware… what were you looking for in that video…?”

The most surprising thing about Bwala’s performance wasn’t the tough challenge. Anyone who agrees to sit across from Mehdi Hasan knows that the interview will not be a tea party. The shame was that Bwala seemed surprised by the facts he was supposed to have mastered before joining the firm.

On insecurity, on corruption, on Tinubu’s words and even on his own previous statements, he has oscillated between denial, deflection and the sort of desperate verbal stalemate that makes a government seem smaller than its critics say it is.

The problem wasn’t that Daniel Bwala appeared lazy or flagrantly unprepared. Indeed, he seemed prepared, even thoroughly rehearsed and robotic. He had the posture, confidence and 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 and devastating facts seem light during a conversation. That quality made Bwala’s escapes even more painful to watch.

The exchange on “context” illustrated this perfectly. Faced 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-imposed verbal obfuscation.

Hasan, by contrast, used numbers and ratios that any government spokesperson worth his salt should already be familiar with. The moment turned absurd when Bwala insisted that the context of the worsening statistics was that things were not getting worse.

* Excerpt from Tribune.