[OPINION] Bwala, and the job of “opposition”

By Abimbola Adelakun

In his interview session with broadcaster Ifedayo Olarinde (Daddy Freeze), presidential media aide Daniel Bwala got the chance to state his side of what happened during his recent infamous Al Jazeera interview with Mehdi Hasan. Bwala claimed he was unnerved when his words were read back to him in the studio because he did not expect it, and he also had no immediate recollection of them at the time. While he initially denied his own words, he also owned them because “that was what I was expected to do: to de-market the opposition”. Now, that is striking. So, throughout the times Bwala was playing “opposition politics”, he just spoke to colour the air, not because he had carefully reasoned his position? By his own admission, his politics was not only unprincipled but also lacked a sturdy base in deep reflection and moral persuasion. Everything he said and did was simply because there was a paycheck attached. It was—and has always been—a politics without accountability, and he had no reason to give a thought to his defection from one side of the carpet to another—which, admittedly, is not much of a move in a place like Nigeria.

To Bwala, it was just a job, and he would just as easily slide to another side of the aisle with the same playbook without seeing himself as betraying anything. He did not invent the game; he played it the only way he knew, and he did not even need to improve on it. Bwala seemed genuinely shocked that Hasan took his politics more seriously than he himself did. Except that his self-justification also missed an important point about politics. As unethical as the political game can be, there are still standards expected of the players. Outside the Nigerian space, politics is not like playing for a football team in one season and playing for a rival team in another. People are expected to stick to a side and passionately defend their team, not flip-flop. A politician can fail to keep their promises, work with a politician they had earlier denounced, but they typically maintain their persuasion to the set of ideologies that differentiates them from a rival party. That was missing here. Bwala’s defenders have been quick to remind us that some of the people who currently work in Donald Trump’s administration were the so-called “never Trumpers”. But if the defenders opened their eyes a little wider, they would notice that these defections were not interparty.

If there is something Bwala’s poor outing vividly reflects, it is the poor quality of what passes for “opposition politics” in Nigeria. Many of them, whether party spokespersons or members of all cadres, lack convictions. They may go on television every chance they get, seize a microphone at every public occasion, or even set a ring light on their social media channels and talk to no end, but that does not mean they believe in anything. They are merely rehearsing a role as they await the summons from the higher-paying side. Because the politics lacks depth and conviction, it also lacks accountability. Opposition politics is simply a bid for time in a continent where time itself is the space between two elections. It gets hilarious when people complain that the APC is swallowing up the opposition, but was there ever really one in the first place? What exists is fickle, a rickety contraption that groans loudly with every lurch it makes. Some people think Bola Tinubu was a “master strategist” for co-opting critics like Bwala to his side, but, frankly, he was not much of a conquest. These are easy pickings.

Nigerians deserve better than politics that has no other goal than power capture, lacks representation, and hardly considers itself accountable to the very people on whose behalf it supposedly champions democracy and democratic ideals. One day, it is here, and another day, it moves over there without giving thought to its own flux. Bwala is a symbol of the many things wrong with our democracy—a politics that never resonates the voice of the people but regularly exploits their anger; a politics that never dissents out of principle but simply to gain clout. This politics dredges up the people’s resistance impulses, not to properly galvanise their energies towards proper social functioning, but to agitate them to no end. That is why the country is full of multi-dimensional anger: people are angry at the failures of the leaders they voted for, angry that their supposed statesmen have turned executioners, angry at their increasing inability to do anything about the consuming cycle of failures, and angry at their failure to see an end to the charade.

People like Bwala have gotten by on this politics for so long that his face looked funny under the glare of Al Jazeera’s studios. In Nigeria, Bwala could have continued deflecting accountability for his defection by simply blaming the opposition and yelling “Peter Obi!” or “Obidients!” at every opportunity. But in Al Jazeera’s studios, far from the ideologically shorn Nigerian social environment, such a claim would ring hollow. Without his usual gimmicks, Bwala was completely disarmed.

We can, of course, argue that politics require some degree of clown show, such as Bwala demonstrated while he was “playing opposition”, but without any ideological core to the theatrics, we are just running to remain at the same spot. The superficiality is not even the worst part. The bigger tragedy is that there is no motivation for anyone to be better. The APC itself is a classic example of an opposition politics that was fact-free and ideologically vacuous, an ethically lacking conglomerate of corrupt bedfellows that nevertheless snagged the ultimate prize. If they could go that far without any substantial base, why should anyone else waste their time creating one?

If there is anything the APC can take away from Bwala’s unfortunate outing, it is for them to temper down their tendency to coopt—and corrupt—anyone who claims to be playing opposition politics. They are so averse to criticism that one can only imagine the resonant echo chamber their intra-party dialogues must look like. You do not need to bring everyone to heel simply because you have deep pockets. The APC thinks it is smart, but taking down the loud, critical voices through persuasion or coercion monotonizes public space. They must have agreed to the Al Jazeera interview because they wanted to show off their modest achievements one year before the election. Unfortunately for them, they played themselves; their messenger became the message.

Finally, Bwala should either get professional help or stay away from the international media circuits forever. From the video of the interview prep he shared, and judging by the body language of his team, my impression is that none of them would have been able to throw him a curveball—exactly what he would have needed to confront an interviewer like Mehdi Hasan, known for aggressive, abrasive interviewing. The all-male team (Nigeria’s homosocial political environment disdains women; please check out all the photos that emerge from their various meetings) looks more like yes-men, another fallout of a politics that brooks no dissent. None of his men seems like they can boldly look the kolanut tree in the face and dare to tell it that its fruit is bitter. That is why, when Bwala finally found himself in a situation where the power dynamics were not in his favour, he fumbled and stumbled badly.

Culled from The Punch