President Bola Tinubu: Turn Back Daniel Bwala!



It is not my style writing to complain on what has become a nauseating fad in APC where those that work against the party are rewarded over and above those that worked for the party, right from the most difficult opposition years.


This negative culture started when APC landed power after years of crunching, nerve-wrecking opposition. The ensuing Buhari government looked away from those that sacrificed sweat and blood and underwent deep strictures to see the party mutate from the anti-military days to become the opposition in  PDP days and fought the excruciating war to wrest power from the PDP.


Buhari sustained this queer reward system through his eight years in power and all other elected APC governors followed suit.


There was therefore this huge expectation that the incoming government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu would right this anomaly and ensure due recompense to the long suffering rank and file of the party who had hardly felt the effects of working for and supporting a ruling party.


While it is too early to judge the Tinubu government on the issue of rightly addressing the unjust reward system in APC, the widespread feeling is that apart from the few that got into vantage political positions, not much have been done to ensure those that worked for the party are rewarded as is appropriate.


Those that felt President Tinubu would install an order that would guarantee a just and proper reward culture in APC hinged their optimism on the fact that Tinubu is a well-grounded veteran politician that was best placed to measure and know the feelings of those that trudged with him, over decades to get to where we are today. He is gifted with that rare capacity to know who to reward for labouring to elevate the party to the height it occupies today and the apt way to reward them. So theirs was not a misplaced hope given that he who wears the shoe is best placed to know where it pinches.


But we have observed that the same forces we fought and displaced to get APC to power are turning around, devouring their vomit and scheming their ways into commanding positions in the APC governments while the fates of the most potent forces that worked themselves thin to displace them from power remain stagnant and in most cases, worse. Those, who only yesterday, were spilling phlegm and bile against the APC, are today, sneaking their ways back to the corridors of power and some are being rewarded with choice positions while those that milked their life blood to see APC to power are being watched to  wither away in palpable negligence since 2015! This is nauseous, repulsive, abhorrent and intolerable. 


Recently, the nation's space was awash with the reportage that Daniel Bwala, Atiku and PDP's protege and spokesman who renounced his membership of APC when President Tinubu emerged candidate of APC and picked Vice President Kashim Shettima as his Vice Presidential candidate, was in Aso Rock where he met with President Tinubu. This was coming just a week after the same Bwala was widely reported to have said that President Tinubu won't achieve anything even if given thirty years to rule Nigeria. 


As a follow-up to his fortune-hunting adventure to Aso Rock, we have been inundated with voluble snippets about the visit itself from both Bwala and the Nigerian media and speculations about his consideration for some lofty political appointment is rife all over the space. Sho? Just like that?


This is the very first time I am writing about the strange negative reward system in APC, the first time I am raising a complaint about what has become a penchant of the party leadership and its various governments to starve the geese that lay the golden eggs to death and patronize fastidious fortune hunters, renegades and fleet-footed speculators. The Bwala issue is too stenchy for me to take in and too noxious for me to ignore. If that is the way those than run APC and those that benefit from the collective sacrifice and pains we made want to run the party, they should better prepare for a revolt from the loyal dog that is starving to certain death while opportunistic dogs continue an unimpeded feast on the rump of loyalty.


Daniel Bwala's expedition to Aso Rock is enough to provoke a protest in me for the very insensate manner he worked against Tinubu and APC. He was loud, vulgar, boastful, untamed, ill-mannered, annoying and uncultured in denigrating and defaming the candidacy of President Tinubu in the last presidential election. He was downright mannerless in prosecuting whatever interest he was prospecting with Atiku and PDP. He demonstrated mean and lowly demeanour one would least expect from a politician who would sooner eat his vomit and revel about meeting the very Tinubu he so excoriated and mangled before, during and after the 2023 presidential election. It will take a man with a borderless degree of shamelessness and infamy to indulge in such voyage in opportunism as Bwala made to Aso Rock. Yes, politics abhors permanent foes but not a Bwala with his zealous devotion to the project to besmear, demarket and  demean both Tinubu and APC just the other day.


In my years as a progressive footsoldier, spanning my university days as a ranking student leader during the June 12 debacle, my days as a front line  pro-democracy fighter during the military era, as a member, devotee and supporter of the progressive forces from AD to APC, and as a writer, I can boast, baring the risk of sounding  immodest, that only very few Nigerians have done more than I have done to get the progressives to where we are today. Yet, in that long period, I have done everything solely at my expenses. Yet, during this long years, I have stayed glued to my lane. I have never asked nor gotten any favor from any one, not even a handshake! I have done all I have done (and still continues to do) from the depths of my progressive conviction. It is not for the reward but I will revolt if scoundrels and renegades are consciously being patronized with the products of my sweat and those of other millions of Nigerians. That is why I am protesting that a dancer of fortune like Daniel Bwala is presently scavenging where I and millions of other neglected Nigerians sowed. I cannot take it!


That i have not asked for nor gotten anything from APC governments do not vitiate my belief that a laborer deserves his wage or that all good works deserve reward. That I have never strained myself to ask for it and that none has been given me does not lease such reward to reprobates that worked directly against APC. That is my point. There are millions of APC faithfuls that need and deserve these patronages. 


I know thousands of Nigerians who have done equally so much for the APC, those that worked themselves thin to see it to power and sustain it against the bile, the virulent attacks, the umbrage and the fluctuating transactions of such people as Bwala. I know these Nigerians are pinning away in neglect all over the country while watching helplessly as the Bwalas and their ilk waltz their ways from atrocious opposition to positions of power right inside APC governments.  This is unacceptable and I hope President Tinubu  disappoints these dancers of fortune and reward those that deserve reward after all, it is unjust to feed the dogs with food meant for children. 


In a nutshell, I expect President Tinubu to turn back Daniel Bwala and his fellow fortune hunters and install a regime to identify and reward those that have worked for and supported APC from its formative years to the present for that is a natural course in life.



Peter Claver Oparah


Ikeja, Lagos.