“In anger, I tweeted what you read,” Bosun tells Senate

Bosun Tijani, a tech guru and ministerial nominee for President Tinubu’s cabinet has explained the reason behind his reincarnated controversial tweets to the senate.

Tijani was compelled to explain while undergoing scrutiny in the hollowed Red chamber of the senate on Saturday.

All ministerial nominees have been undergoing screening within the past week.

During the session, Senator Buhari (Oyo North) questioned Tijani’s patriotism for Nigeria while referring to some of his old tweets.

Bosun’s old tweets resurfaced after President Tinubu nominated him for a ministerial appointment on Wednesday.

In one of the old tweets, the ministerial nominee spoke ill about the Nigerian passport and Nigeria as a nation while others spoke ill of President Bola Tinubu.

Senator Buhari while questioning the nominee read the exact tweet that had gone viral, saying, “Nigeria is a bloody expensive tag to have against your name. Leave patriotism for a minute- that tag is a bloody waste of energy. A second foreign passport isn’t sufficient to clean that sin.”

“Is that still your position or have you changed your mindset, Nigerians need to know,” Senator Buhari questioned.

Responding, Tijani told the lawmakers that he made that tweet out of frustration over an experience he had while trying to get a visa from China.

While explaining his level of patriotism to the country, the ministerial nominee recounted his ordeal saying:

“I have spent the last 15 years of my life going across the world looking for people to support people who believe they can use technology to uplift this world.

“Every time you get to the lobby of my offices, you’d find an artwork, and embedded in the centre of the artwork is the Nigerian flag.”

He explained, “In 2019, sequel to what I did with Google, the business I do with young people requires that they raise money and their ability to raise money relies on investors from abroad and I did everything possible to ensure that I built an office that is fully domiciled in Nigeria.

“In the technology space, people hardly domicile their businesses in Nigeria but I domiciled my business in Nigeria.”

Tijani said that in 2019, “We decided to improve Nigerians’ opportunity to be able to raise more funds for Nigeria and we needed to do a tour of the whole world and we didn’t just want to do it as Nigeria but as Africa.

“So, I opened up 15 slots, this whole trip was paid for by Google, and nothing came to me. We gave eight of the slots to Nigerians because I have a second citizen which is a British passport.

“I was in the UK and I was trying to apply to the Chinese embassy because I do not need a passport to other countries of the world,” he said.

Tijani further explained that a visa collection process that would have lasted for two days took him a minimum of two weeks to complete, just because he mentioned he was from Nigeria.

He said, “They asked me what I do and that I needed to provide my pay slip. I told them I run my business and they requested my bank account statement, I told them my business is fully domiciled in Nigeria.

“The moment I told them my business was domiciled in Nigeria, the young man told me they had to do a check on me which would take a minimum of two weeks.

‘In anger, I tweeted what you read, which was paraphrased wrongly, and now I have a taste of what the youths do to you as well. The tweet you read is just the first part of what you read,” he noted while pleading with the lawmakers that he was only a victim of misinformation.

He added that the second part read explicitly mentioned, “For us to lift this country, we must find a way to correct our image to project a positive image because I don’t want my two young girls to grow up to experience the same thing.

“What they have given you is the first screenshot which is convenient for them.”

The nominee holds two degrees from the University of Jos; a B.Sc in Economics and a Diploma in Computer Science.

He also obtained a Master’s degree in Information Systems and Management in 2007 from the Warwick Business School in England and completed a Ph.D. programme in Innovation and Economic Development at the University of Leicester.

Tijani is the CEO and co-founder of Hub. He has led the expansion of CcHub across Nigeria, Kenya, and more recently, Namibia.