President of the African School of Governance, Kingsley Moghalu has disclosed that since airing of Daniel Bwala interview with Mehdi Hasan on AlJazeera ‘s Head to Head program, he has “received several calls from friends from various countries around the world. All were in shock and felt sorry to see Nigeria placed in such a spot.”
In a Facebook update on Sunday, he pointed out that the interview made a spectacle of Nigeria, not just because of the global reach of the program, but also the format in which there was an international audience in the room itself.
The former presidential aspirant wondered what each of the audience members will think about Nigeria after such a fact-based shredding of the country’s leadership and its performance. He maintained that the outing was more of a monumental disaster for Nigeria as a country, and the Tinubu administration than for Bwala whose track record speaks for itself.
According to him, “It was a sad commentary on Nigeria’s political culture in which there are no beliefs, no policies, no ideology, just crass opportunism and the battle for political power. Turn-coatism is “it”.
“Second, the fact that Bwala, given his record, is sent out to speak for the President of Nigeria on the international stage says much about the standards by which government in Nigeria recruits people for specific roles. In that universe “loyalty”, fleeting though it may be, is all that counts. Competence doesn’t. Mediocrity reigns.
“Thirdly, why appoint former attack dogs of the political opposition as spokespersons and Ambassadors for the administration simply because they have “defected”? The baggage such individuals carry (especially when they did not simply espouse principled opposition that may later change, as sometimes happens in politics, but rather used incendiary and personalized attacks on President Tinubu)renders such persons lacking in credibility in representational roles. Bwala was left trying to eat his words with bare-faced lies!
“I think there are people who could be far more credible spokesmen and women for Nigeria’s government, even with all its underperformance in governance. At least, the discussion will focus on the actual track record of the government, not on the government spokesman’s prior condemnations of that track record.”
Moghalu maintained that so many people around the world are waiting and hoping for when our country will “wake up” and take its rightful place given that Nigerians are brilliant, hardworking and respected globally, breaking barriers and achieving feats in various spheres.
He pointed out that “the government and incompetent governance of Nigeria by its politicians remains a sorry tale.”
Meanwhile, Bwala, a presidential spokesman, wasted no time in reacting to the backlash generated by his parlous performance in the Aljazeera interview. His attempt at damage control is partly captured in the following remarks:
“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…”
