My tweet about Nigeria was out of frustration, Bosun Tijani tells senators

One of the ministerial nominees, Bosun Tijani, has explained the reason behind his controversial tweet to the Senate.

Tijani, a tech guru, made this known while answering a question posed to him by Senator Fatai Buhari (Oyo North) when he appeared at the hallowed Red Chamber for screening on Saturday.

Bosun had in an old post tweeted that he didn’t appreciate the Nigerian passport and Nigeria as a nation.

Aside from the tweet in contention, a number of the nominee’s old tweets about President Bola Tinubu had gone viral since his name emerged on the ministerial list on Wednesday.

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.

Tijani, in response, told the lawmakers that he made that tweet out of frustration over what he experienced while trying to get a visa from China.

According to PUNCH, the nominee explained that he had been at the forefront of displaying patriotism through the work he does for the Nigerian youths.

“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.

He recalled that when he got to the Chinese embassy, they told him hat it would take two days to get his visa and he was very excited.

However, he stated that things went South for him the moment he mentioned that his business was based in Nigeria and it was at that point that he made the tweet.

Tijani noted, “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.

Tijani further pleaded with the lawmakers that he was only a victim of misinformation.