By Daniel Bwala

Social media has exploded over my interview with Mehdi Hassan, albeit with varied opinions. Let me set the record straight.

When I signed on to the privileged job granted to me by Mr. President, I was well aware of its implications. Selling ice cream, looking fine, and seeking the praises of men were never part of it. Some of the fiercest critics of my interview can not even stand local TV anchors. But the task of promoting and defending the President and his administration is what I do with ease and joy. I am prepared to appear before any interviewer, anywhere in the world, any day and at any time, to defend this government and its policies.

I have never, and will never, subscribe to ducking or dodging interviews on matters that concern promoting and defending the administration I was appointed to serve. It is the least of what is required of me.

Head to Head contacted me requesting an interview, stating that they wanted to challenge our government on security, the economy, and corruption. Nowhere in our almost six months of communication did they mention that they were going to challenge my past. If that had been their plan, ethically and professionally, they were supposed to inform me so I could prepare my response. But that’s okay, ethically, that is on them, not on me.

I refused to swallow the pill of Mehdi’s “opposition research-style journalism,” and even today, if you carefully compare what he read as quotes from organisations and groups, you will see that many were inaccurate and some were outright fake news. But I will leave that for another day.

As for what I said about President Tinubu in the past, I am glad those were things I said when I was in the opposition saddle with such zeal. It is all politics. Half of Donald Trump’s cabinet is made up of people who once spoke against him, and quite a number of people in our own cabinet also spoke against President Tinubu in the past. Those things do not bother him if you care to know.

The majority of the naysayers are members of the opposition and their sympathisers. It does not bother me one bit. Their temporary excitement over the interview has not lasted and will not last, because it does not take away their obvious problem of lack of vision, mission in conducting and managing a political party; yet they seek to manage Nigeria. Clearly they have no path to victory and no alternative policies or program for the Nigerian people. And if they say they do, they can as well go to head to head and be interrogated on that; as the saying in Hausa goes “Ga fili Ga doki”

I conclude by thanking the many Nigerians and non-Nigerians who sent in their commendations over my brave defence of our government in an interview where the anchor would hardly let you answer a question unless it suited his narrative.

I still have admiration and respect for Mehdi Hassan as arguably the best debater on the planet. I look forward to part two of the Head to Head interview, and I am glad that by then questions about my past will no longer be news so that we can focus on our administration’s policies, programs and what we have achieved so far.

Bwala Is Special Adviser to the President on Media and Policy Communication

By Phrank Shaibu

We have read the latest statement issued by Daniel Bwala in the aftermath of his rather embarrassing interview with a mixture of suppressed disgust and embarrassment — not for ourselves, but for the sheer enthusiasm with which he parades falsehoods as though repetition could somehow elevate them into truth.

Bwala’s sudden discovery of courage and rhetorical flourish is rather amusing, especially from someone whose political trajectory has been defined less by conviction and more by opportunistic merchandising of allegiance.

Since he now appears eager to rewrite history, it is necessary to refresh his memory.

We remain in possession of his message requesting that the Atiku Media Team issue a press statement claiming that President Tinubu and his associates were threatening his life. He was quite insistent that we amplify that narrative at the time. We declined deliberately because we recognised it for what it was: a frivolous and opportunistic attempt at political theatre, consistent with his long-established penchant for turning politics into a marketplace where loyalty is traded like a commodity.

He should therefore spare Nigerians the moral lectures about courage and conviction. The record speaks for itself.

His attempt to recast the Mehdi Hassan interview as some heroic act of intellectual bravery is equally amusing. Anyone who watched that exchange objectively saw something quite different. The interviewer methodically dismantled the talking points he came armed with and exposed, one after the other, the contradictions between his past statements and his present posture.

Bwala was confronted with his own words about President Tinubu — statements he once made with remarkable certainty — only to retreat into the tired refuge that “it was politics.” But it is both wicked and morally bankrupt to dismiss matters of grave national consequence as mere politics. The wastage of thousands of Nigerian lives to insecurity over the past two years cannot be brushed aside with that cynical refrain. To trivialise such human tragedy as “politics” is nothing short of wickedness, an admission of abysmal failure, and sheer madness.

He struggled visibly to reconcile those statements with his current role defending the same administration he once criticised so vigorously. When confronted with documented criticisms from credible organisations regarding governance failures, he resorted not to evidence or argument but to the lazy dismissal of calling them “fake news.”

At several points, the interviewer’s persistence reduced his defence of both his principal and the government’s record to a series of evasions and rhetorical detours.

What Nigerians witnessed was not the fearless demolition of hostile journalism he now imagines, but the uncomfortable spectacle of a spokesperson struggling to reconcile shifting loyalties with inconvenient facts. In truth, the interview tore through the carefully constructed narrative he attempted to present and left both his arguments and the government’s talking points in tatters.

Bwala boasts about being willing to appear before any interviewer anywhere in the world. But the challenge is not appearing on every television platform across the globe; the real challenge is defending the indefensible. Even if he were granted a prime interview on Heaven Times, the arguments he would carry there would still collapse under the weight of their own contradictions — half-baked, half-foolish, and wholly unconvincing.

How does anyone credibly defend a government that has turned forgery into an instrument of statecraft and gathered around itself a nest of professional forgers? And what kind of government hires its former fiercest critic as its media dry cleaner? Predictably, Mr. Bwala did yesterday what he has always done — he did not clean the garment; he tore it.

Since Bwala now appears eager to posture as a public intellectual, it may also be necessary to address something far more elementary.

It is always risky when a man who cannot count water begins to count his arguments as facts.

How does a “lawyer,” one so eager to sermonise about competence, manage to betray such basic illiteracy in the English language?

Water, for his information, is an uncountable noun. One does not say “this is a water.” One says “this is water” or “a glass of water.”

But perhaps precision — whether in language or in truth — has never really been his strongest suit.

What remains astonishing is not merely the elasticity of his political loyalties, but the gusto with which he now attempts to launder them as principle.

History, unfortunately for him, keeps receipts.

And so do we.

Shaibu is a Senior Special Assistant to Atiku Abubakar on Public Communication