It’s all about context

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

Since Friday evening when Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head interview with Special Adviser to the President on Policy Communication Barrister Daniel Bwala was aired on Aljazeera, the social media scene in Nigeria has been awash with words such as “humiliation,” “disgrace,” “unprepared”, “evasive,” “volte face,” “hypocrisy” and “resignation.” I intend to become the only person in Nigeria who will defend our brother Bwala from the sneak foreign/local social media lynch mobs and put everything in its proper context.

Those who are saying that Daniel Bwala has been humiliated by Aljazeera interviewer Mehdi Hasan, do they know what is the meaning of humiliation? Just because one overzealous foreign journalist was firing rapid-fire questions at you, did not give you a list of the questions in advance and was not giving you the chance to respond, is that what you call humiliation? For proper context, why not say that Daniel Bwala humiliated Mehdi Hasan by sitting tight and refusing to be provoked by his questioning?

Look, Bwala could have responded in different ways to the inquisition, sorry, questioning. Not too long ago, I was watching a video clip from an interview on Egyptian television. Even though I understand only the little Arabic I learnt in our primary school textbook Kitabul Adafal, I could see that the discussion was very heated. Suddenly, the man being interviewed, obviously provoked by the questioning, stood up, walked across the studio and grabbed the interviewer by the neck. Why won’t we appreciate Bwala for not doing the same and grabbing Mehdi Hasan’s neck? Bwala is of heavy body build while Mehdi Hasan is slight, and I did not see any British Bobbies in that studio.  

One of the most provocative questions was why Daniel Bwala, once a fierce spokesman of the opposition to President Bola Tinubu and his ruling APC party, accepted an appointment and is now one of the Presidency’s most vociferous spokespersons and defenders. Why not? Is he the first person in the world who went from the opposition to the ruling party? The old wag in the British House of Commons who invented the phrase cross-carpet, you mean he didn’t know what he was talking about?

This man Mehdi seemed to think that it is a moral depravity when a person crosses from one distant camp to another. That is because he lacks the wisdom of the late ASUU President Dr. Mahmud Tukur Modibbo, who once said in the 1980s that many people are wrong to think of the political spectrum as linear when in reality, it is semi-circular. The extreme ends, he said, are actually nearer to each other than people think; that it is the political center that is far away from the extremes. It is easier for a Communist to become a Fascist than to become a liberal. It is therefore easy to cross from one extreme to another, because the gap is so close.

People are saying that Daniel Bwala’s perspective of things changed completely when he slid from the opposition to the power circles. Is that an offense? Look, if you are a pedestrian who believes that all motorists are reckless and are trying to knock down pedestrians, the day you own a car, will your perspective not change, to now believe that all pedestrians are illiterate and do not know the simple rules of crossing a road? The same person who, as a tenant, believes that landlords are wicked and heartless, the day he becomes a landlord, will he not believe that tenants are scammers who are always cooking up ways to dodge paying rent on time?

Mehdi Hasan tried to make a mountain out of a molehill of Bwala’s 2022 statement, when he was in the opposition, about the two bullion vans that were once seen in President Tinubu’s Bourdillon Street house on election eve. Bwala is absolutely right; who said the sight of bullion vans alone is the evidence of vote buying? Did you peer inside the vans and saw what was actually in there? It is because you don’t know Nigeria. Many times when you see a bank bullion van charging through our streets with sirens blaring and a policeman lashing at motorists with a whip, there is not a kobo in it. It is probably out to deliver groceries to the bank manager’s house because his wife said dinner prep is behind schedule.

Even the statement Bwala once made that President Tinubu and his people formed a militia, what was wrong with that? Is that not a compliment in Nigerian politics? Which serious politician in Nigeria ever goes around without a personal militia? I remember the story of a certain gubernatorial candidate in Nigeria who once said that as he was sitting in his house at 3am on the eve of party primaries, waiting for morning, his opponent sent thugs, who invaded his house and carted away all his money. The question I asked him was, why were you sitting alone at 3am on election eve, with no thugs guarding your house? Is that what you wanted a veteran politician like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to do, in a hot place such as Lagos, without OPC militia men at the gate?

I agree completely with Bwala that insecurity has not increased in Nigeria under the Tinubu Presidency, that it is only a matter of calling a glass of water half empty instead of half full. Those of us who have been around in Nigeria for a while, we know that there is almost no armed robbery today, only kidnapping, cattle rustling, banditry and insurgency. Even the kidnapping that people say is now an epidemic, is it not the fault of MTN, Glo, Airtel and 9Mobile? If not because of these networks, how could a bandit kidnap anyone on the highway, then be able to reach his family and negotiate for ransom, down to giving instructions on where to drop the money? When the PDP government was bringing GSM in 2001, didn’t it think of the security implications? You now blame APC for the kidnap epidemic.

Bwala was very right when he disputed Mehdi’s quoting statistics from Amnesty International, and said Amnesty always says bad things about everybody. They never see the good side of things. When it said that 22,000 Nigerians were killed in violent attacks in 2025, again that was a case of half empty and half full glasses. Why didn’t they say 239,978,000 Nigerians out of 240 million were not killed last year, a very big kudos to Nigeria Police? Bwala even asked Mehdi, how many Americans were killed last year? For our information, fifty murders take place in USA every day. Indeed, the country has been declared as “the most homicidal nation in the world.” So why is Donald Trump not bombing Memphis, Tennessee, adjudged to be “the most violent city in America,” and instead chose to bomb Sokoto State, a very peaceful place?

I even saw some people criticizing Daniel Bwala for saying he did not know that the Aljazeera interview was going to touch on his past. He is right. Mehdi Hasan himself, can he withstand a probe of his past by the likes of the aggressive Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who once tried to provoke Ayatollah Khomeini during an interview? Can Mehdi Hasan make available to us his WhatsApp chats, and let us see if his wife will be happy with what she sees? Context is very important, as Bwala said. Why have we not had a Jeffrey Epstein scandal here in Nigeria? It is only adult women accusing some ministers and senators of harassing them. The only under-aged girl abducted in Nigeria was by a security officer, who spirited her away from Jigawa to Abuja. We have many billionaires in Nigeria, but none of them was said to have smuggled an under-aged girl into a yacht or a private plane, and shipped her off to a private island.  

Those people on social media who are saying Daniel Bwala should resign after the Aljazeera “debacle,” they don’t know what they are talking about. Resign for where? All the people who have said far worse things in Nigerian media interviews, from the one who said a minister was “invited to come and eat,” to the one who described an upcoming election as “a do or die,” to the one who said “telephones are not for the poor,” and even the one who said “stealing is not corruption,” which one of them ever resigned? Okay, if you resign, who will feed your family, when every day there are reports of rising food prices and even this war in the Middle East is causing fuel prices to rise?

Look, it is all a matter of context. In 1996 when US Republican candidate Robert Dole told his mother he was running for president, she said, “Is Presidency more important than sitting at the dinner table and eating together with your family?” Is fidelity to a political group more important than feeding your family?