By Festus AKANBI
The internet has been having a field day since the so-called “ambush” of Daniel Bwala, one of President Tinubu’s spokespersons, unfolded before a global audience.
One wonders why the spectacle continues to trend as though it were the season finale of a particularly dramatic television series.
More curious still is the applause showered on the programme anchor, Mehdi Hasan, whose decision to turn what ought to have been a civil interview into something resembling a televised duel is now being hailed in some quarters as the gold standard of journalism.
Part of the explanation lies in the strange democracy of the social media age, where everyone with a smartphone and an opinion now considers themselves a newsroom of one. In this bustling digital marketplace, nuance is often traded away for noise, and the old virtues of careful questioning and balanced reporting struggle to survive the crowd.
There is also the mood of the moment. Public anger, some justified, some wildly misplaced, hangs thick in the air like harmattan dust.
In such an atmosphere, reasoning easily gives way to reaction, and every confrontation is instantly crowned as a victory for someone’s preferred narrative.
Then, of course, there is that enthusiastic brigade that delights in any episode capable of painting the government in embarrassing colours. For them, the clip was less an interview than a trophy.
Truth be told, Bwala did wander into a trap, the kind that looks harmless until the door snaps shut behind you. And as anyone who has ever stepped into a political bear trap knows, the bruises from such encounters rarely disappear overnight. In the unforgiving memory of the internet, that particular scar may take quite some time to fade.
