Presidential aide Daniel Bwala says Al Jazeera privately apologised to him over his widely criticised interview with Mehdi Hasan on the network’s Head to Head programme.
He, however, said the broadcaster declined his request to make the apology public, prompting him to instruct his lawyers in England to sue for defamation.
Bwala disclosed this in a recent interview on Morayo Afolabi-Brown’s show which was published on Wednesday on YouTube, months after his March 2026 appearance on Al Jazeera, in which Hasan confronted him with past comments he made against President Bola Tinubu while he supported Atiku Abubakar.
Asked whether he had demanded an apology from Hasan following the interview, Bwala said the network acknowledged its conduct but refused to make it public.
“They apologised to me privately. I said they should put it on social media. They said they will not put it on social media, it will affect their credibility, because it’s not just them, but their other programmers at the Al Jazeera network too,” he said.
Asked what the substance of the apology was, Bwala said it centred on Al Jazeera’s failure to disclose that part of the interview would interrogate his credibility over his past criticism of Tinubu.
“The substance of the apology was that they should have told me that part of what they discussed with me was a talking point, that they were also going to interrogate me on my credibility for supporting the person I had attacked before.
“By their own ethics, they ought to have told me that, but they said they were sorry they didn’t,” he said.
He said he also consulted media analysts, including British broadcaster Piers Morgan, whom he said he reached through a third party, and who agreed that the network’s handling of the interview was wrong.
“If you’re bold, if you call yourself a journalist, a fact-checker, you run your programme live and let people judge live.
“If you’re thinking straight, that’s what you’d do. You took creative control of the programme. You made a recorded programme. Ethics demanded you publish it exactly as it was recorded,” he said.
