Atiku's team condemns Bwala, claims presidential staffer sought fabricated death threat warning

Daniel Bwala, a spokesperson for President Bola Tinubu, has been subjected to a harsh critique by the media office of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, which characterized his recent actions as "opportunistic merchandising of allegiance."

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The scathing attack was launched in a statement released on Saturday by Phrank Shaibu, Atiku's Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, who revealed that Bwala had previously approached them with a request to create a false narrative against the current administration.

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According to Shaibu, Bwala had asked the Atiku Media Team to issue a press statement claiming that President Tinubu and his associates were threatening his life, a request that was deliberately declined due to its "frivolous and opportunistic" nature.

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The statement from Atiku's camp comes on the heels of a widely circulated interview between Bwala and Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan, which the Atiku camp claims exposed the "moral bankruptcy" of dismissing grave national issues as mere politics.

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Shaibu specifically criticized Bwala's defence of the government's record on insecurity, stating that downplaying the loss of thousands of Nigerian lives over the past two years is "nothing short of wickedness."

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The Atiku camp argued that the interview with Mehdi Hasan showed Bwala struggling to reconcile his shifting loyalties with inconvenient facts, with Shaibu noting that "the interviewer methodically dismantled the talking points he came armed with and exposed the contradictions between his past statements and his present posture."

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The Atiku camp also questioned the credibility of a government that "hires its former fiercest critic as its media dry cleaner," implying that Bwala's role in the presidency is questionable.

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Shaibu contended that rather than improving the government's image, Bwala's public defences have only served to further damage it, and also mocked the presidential aide's grammatical slips during public appearances.

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

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The Atiku team warned that Bwala cannot rewrite his political history through "rhetorical detours," asserting that "history keeps receipts," implying that his past actions will ultimately be held against him.