I have said far more about Daniel Bwala’s sensational Al Jazeera rhetorical incineration than I am inclined to, and honestly wanted to move on, but his ludicrous, self-indicting post-interview ego defense has drawn me in again.
I will isolate only the most egregious alibi he invoked to explain away his embarrassing lies, contradictions, inconsistencies, and lack of basic decency to admit the truth.
He says he should have been told in advance that his past criticisms of Tinubu would come up in the interview so he could “prepare himself.” That is a remarkable confession.
In journalism, interviews are not take-home exams where guests receive the questions beforehand, rehearse answers and stroll in to recite them like memorized lines in a secondary school debate.
If that were the standard, every interview would sound like a badly rehearsed stage play, or what my friend and former colleague Crispin Oduobuk used to call a “stand-and-deliver” performance.
The entire point of a personality interview is to test what a guest actually knows and believes when confronted with real questions.
What Bwala has accidentally revealed is far more interesting than his ego-defending, self-pitying lamentation. By complaining that he was not forewarned, he has essentially told us that for all his appearances on Nigerian TVs, he always gets the questions ahead of time. In other words, the “analysis” viewers watch is often scripted, pre-packaged theater.
That’s not journalism. That’s PR. As I pointed out in my August 26, 2020, article titled “Fani-Kayode: All Great Journalists Are ‘Rude’” and again in my February 09, 2023, reflection titled “Kwankwaso’s Superhuman Restraint During Arise TV Interview,” our job as journalists is to rupture the composure of politicians, to so rile them up that they trip up and say things that are unscripted and therefore newsworthy.
“Smart politicians know this,” I wrote. “Instead of allowing themselves to be immobilized by impotent anger, they respond to high-pressure, ’embarrassing’ questions with poise, and disarm adversarial reporters with humility, grace, and gentleness.”
That a presidential spokesperson who fancies himself as a towering intellect does not know that real journalists do not send interview questions in advance, and who did not anticipate, much less prepare for, questions about his own past, says a great deal about him.
And the exam analogy writes itself. Imagine a student protesting after failing a test: “The lecturer never told me these were the questions he was going to ask!”
That protest does not expose the lecturer. It exposes the student. Bwala is, in effect, complaining that he failed the exam because he didn’t get the “expo.”
It makes you wonder how he passed his exams in his educational career, particularly since, for a lawyer, he seems to struggle a great deal with English grammar, his tool of the trade.
He apparently has zero clue what subject-verb agreement means in spoken English. He also appears not to have learned even a little about English plurals and uncountable nouns, which would explain why he said, “this is a water” during the interview.
So, despite the post-interview spin, the complaint says what no critic could say better: he walked into the room unprepared, and the questions did what questions are supposed to do.
