“Even if you give Tinubu 30 years, nothing will work.” – Daniel Bwala, December 2023.
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Daniel Bwala once captured the conscience of the nation with searing honesty. He called things by their names. He warned us with the voice of a watchman seeing fire from afar. He was eloquent, brilliant, unapologetically piercing ,his words were not just spoken; they were etched into the moral ledger of our time. He became a darling of the truth, a rare breed who dared to look power in the face and call it incompetent.
But alas! What tragedy has befallen this once-defiant voice?
Bwala, who once declared, without mincing words, that Tinubu could rule for three decades and still plunge Nigeria into dysfunction, now sits in the inner sanctum of that same regime. He is now Tinubu’s apologist-in-chief, contorting himself into rhetorical knots in defence of a presidency gasping for legitimacy.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
But Daniel Bwala is not doing nothing ,he is doing the worst thing: he is helping whitewash failure, aiding the lubrication of propaganda, and massaging the shoulders of a government under whose weight Nigerians are suffocating. From the herald of truth, he has morphed into the hoarse town-crier of falsehood.
What could have made a man so brilliant turn into such a disgraceful figure of contradiction? What brand of political juju or stomach infrastructure lured Bwala into this grotesque U-turn? The answer lies in a sad but familiar truth: in Nigeria, intellect often bows to the altar of power. Bwala, the man of words, has become a mannequin of convenience. He is no longer a philosopher with principles but a court jester with a briefcase.
“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” – Albert Camus
It would be comedic,if it were not so tragic. The same Bwala who once dissected Tinubu’s track record with scalpel-like precision, has now dulled that blade and is using it to butter the bread of hypocrisy. A man once clothed in conviction now struts in the regalia of contradiction. His metamorphosis is the embodiment of what Franz Fanon described as the native intellectual “betraying the people by becoming a tool of the oppressor.”
And for those who witnessed that unforgettable showdown between Bwala and Rufai Oseni on Arise Television, the stench of betrayal could not have been more pungent. Watching Bwala twist himself into knots trying to explain away his past remarks was nothing short of nauseating. With his usual arrogant bluster, he tried to intimidate Rufai, one of the Nigeria’s most courageous broadcast journalists,claiming that his utterances then were merely his “duty” as Atiku’s spokesperson, and now, as Tinubu’s spokesperson, he sings a different hymn because Tinubu is the “seating president.”
What do we call this? Chameleonic psychopathy? Intellectual prostitution? Perhaps a more apt description is moral schizophrenia, the kind that trades integrity for crumbs of proximity.
To my satisfaction, Rufai, armed with nothing but facts and unflinching poise, punched holes into Bwala’s grandstanding. He laid bare the duplicity with surgical elegance. Rufai stood not as a journalist that day, but as a modern Socratic gadfly, reminding us that the truth, no matter how buried, still has sharp teeth.
“To sell one’s soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul, would you understand why that’s much harder?” – Ayn Rand
Make no mistake ,Daniel Bwala is a brilliant man. His gift of the garb, his commanding logic, and legal dexterity are beyond question. But brilliance without moral spine is worse than ignorance. He is like a lighthouse that has lost its bulb ,a structure of guidance now abandoned to shadows.
He is no longer the truth-teller. He is the pamphleteer of power. A man who now tells Nigerians to endure suffering while he dines at the table of state-sponsored gluttony. A lawyer who has turned his tongue into a weapon of suppression. A man of words who now uses those words not to liberate, but to suffocate.
“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” – Dante Alighieri
Nigeria is burning. The economy is on a stretcher. The poor are suffocating. Inflation has turned basic survival into a luxury. Insecurity has become a daily sermon in every home. The educational system is a carcass. The judiciary is an auction house. The country is bleeding and those who should raise the alarm have become cheerleaders of decay.
And in all of this, Daniel Bwala ,once a lion, has become a parrot. A decorated puppet in the theatre of mediocrity.
History will remember not just what Bwala said, but what he became. A tragic contradiction. A cautionary tale. A lesson in how not to lose one’s soul in pursuit of fleeting relevance.
Let his infamous quote remain not only on marble but in the hearts of every betrayed citizen: “Even if you give Tinubu 30 years, nothing will work.” The shame is, he was right, and now he is wrong.
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