Bwala who met with Tinubu behind closed doors at the State House in Abuja on Wednesday told correspondents, “I told him (President) today, I am committing to play my part to support your administration, and I have no apologies to anybody,” he said.
A chieftain of the opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party, Daniel Bwala, on Wednesday, said he is committed to playing his part to support the administration of President Bola Tinubu.
Bwala, the campaign spokesperson for the candidate of PDP in the 2023 presidential election, Atiku Abubakar, said he made no apologies for his position, adding that if his support for Tinubu would lead to his defection from the PDP to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), so be it.
Bwala who met with Tinubu behind closed doors at the State House in Abuja on Wednesday told correspondents, “I told him (President) today, I am committing to play my part to support your administration, and I have no apologies to anybody,” he said.
“APC is a party. President Bola Tinubu is my motivation; if supporting him will take me to APC, so be it,” he added.
Interestingly, in September 2023, Bwala described the 100 days in office of President Tinubu as "uneventful," calling on him to focus on building Nigeria, rather than embarking on so-called "diplomatic trips" for “photo ops.”
He said President Tinubu’s administration was still governing in poetry, adding that the administration had abandoned its manifesto of securing Nigeria to go on foreign trips for photo ops.
Bwala stated this in an interview with Arise News, adding that what the government had termed as achievements “can be seen by all as just over-exaggeration of their perception of what they call their achievements because in the last 100 days if you ask a Nigerian, they will tell you that nothing has significantly changed in our lives.”
Speaking on the recent business trips that Tinubu took to India and Dubai, Bwala claimed that since the government had nothing to show domestically, going on foreign diplomatic trips was to curry the favour and accolades of the international space.
He described the President’s trip to India for the G20 summit as a global picnic, saying that not much was achieved at the summit due to the absence of both Russia and China.
He also said that the meetings that President Tinubu, who went along with Nigerian businessmen, held with the various businessmen and investors in India did not result in definite conclusions.
He said that those who made statements that there were definite investments were “exaggerating and mentioning monies that could not be verified either by the investors themselves, either through a joint statement, through their website, through their personal social media handle.”
“Everything they said they secured as investment plans or promises could only be established by themselves. There is no one word from any investor in India that they actually committed to such.
“Mark what I’m saying, in the next one year, you will see nothing from Dubai as per investment. You will see nothing from India as per investment because they are just photo ops and statements. There are no specificities, there are no deliverables, and there are no timelines.
“You can only develop and make your country attractive when you focus on your domestic policies on national security interest and national interest of your country. Now, it is contained in your manifesto, you have abandoned that and you’re on a foreign trip to use photo ops as evidence of either legitimacy or evidence of prosperity. That cannot work," he said.