Atiku’s camp slams Bwala, alleges presidential aide requested fake life-threatening alert

By Omeiza Ajayi

The media office of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has launched a scathing attack on Daniel Bwala, a spokesperson to President Bola Tinubu, describing his recent political posturing as “opportunistic merchandising of allegiance.”

In a statement released Saturday by Atiku’s Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, the camp alleged that Bwala had previously approached them with a request to manufacture a false narrative against the current administration.

“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,” Shaibu revealed.

He noted that the team deliberately declined the request, labelling it a “frivolous and opportunistic attempt at political theatre.”

The statement comes in the wake of a widely circulated interview between Bwala and Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hassan.

While Bwala has characterised the exchange as an act of intellectual bravery, the Atiku camp argued that the interview instead exposed the “moral bankruptcy” of dismissing grave national issues as mere politics.

Shaibu particularly criticised Bwala’s defence of the government’s record on insecurity, stating that trivialising the loss of thousands of Nigerian lives over the past two years is “nothing short of wickedness.”

“The interviewer methodically dismantled the talking points he came armed with and exposed the contradictions between his past statements and his present posture. What Nigerians witnessed was the uncomfortable spectacle of a spokesperson struggling to reconcile shifting loyalties with inconvenient facts”, said Shaibu.

The Atiku camp further mocked Bwala’s role in the presidency, questioning the credibility of a government that “hires its former fiercest critic as its media dry cleaner.”

Shaibu contended that rather than cleaning the government’s image, Bwala’s public defences have only served to tear it further.

Taking a swipe at Bwala’s professional and linguistic precision, the statement also mocked the presidential aide for grammatical slips during his public appearances.

“It is always risky when a man who cannot count water begins to count his arguments as facts,” Shaibu added, referencing a specific linguistic error made by the lawyer.

The Atiku team warned that Bwala cannot rewrite his political history through “rhetorical detours,” asserting that “history keeps receipts.”

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