70 Hearty Cheers to Dr. Wole Adamolekun, former Secretary General of APRA

I celebrate Dr. Wole Adamolekun, associate professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Elizade University, Nigeria, and one of my predecessors in the African Public Relations Association (APRA) on his 70th birth anniversary.

Dr. Wole Adamolekun, former Secretary General of APRA

He is a worthy septuagenarian, having lived those years serving man and country.

The history of APRA will be incomplete without filling the gap with the visionary role of Dr. Adamolekun as a leading light of those who came to its rescue at the most challenging times.

It was he (with the support of other people, especially enablers like Mallam Kabir Dangogo (of blessed memory, his immediate predecessor), who re-established the foundations of APRA, emplaced structures for the sustainability of the secretariat following the decision to make Nigeria the  new secretariat of the continental body of public relations practitioners and professionals.

It was uncle Wole who essentially prevented a reoccurrence of the dormancy APRA hitherto suffered for over 5 years as he and Dangogo facilitated the registration of APRA in Nigeria and he never wavered since then.

A man of immense sense of gratitude, Dr. Adamolekun almost caused me to cry with his account of how the late Kabir Dangogo and Chief Larry Williams nudged and supported him to become Secretary General of APRA at the Johannesburg Conference of the Association in 2006.

He would continue in the tradition of mentorship as he also mentored Chief Yomi Badejo-Okusanya (YBO) to succeed him. A man under a special grace, YBO, is possibly the only Secretary General of APRA who became president and perhaps the longest-serving official of APRA. I have had the fortune of coming under the tutelage of these men mentioned in this  narrative.

For Adamolekun, the brass tacks for today, long after his tenure lapsed, he continued to participate in APRA programmes with passion and commitment, bringing on board rare values.

Besides attending all APRA forums, he serves as a reviewer, alongside others, particularly his colleague, Peter Munywoki Mutie, former President of APRA, to review abstracts for paper presentationAPRA conferences.

A member of the APRA Board of Trustees, Dr. Adamolekun is on the African Regional Council of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management (GA), serving concurrently as a member of the Governing Board of the Global PR body. He is the Chair of GA’s Academic and Research Council, a central arm of GA shaping knowledge production and sharing.

Scholar, practitioner, and administrator, Dr. Adamolekun is a stickler to ethics, professionalism, and value as the central organizing principles of public relations.

He was the pioneer head of communications, information, and public relations at the Mass Mobilization for Self-Reliance, Social Justice, and Economic Recovery (MAMSER), the forerunner of the National Orientation Agency. Anyone familiar with the works of MAMSER would recall the impeccable communication campaigns rolled out by the agency in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Adamolekun started his career in communication management as a freelance journalist at the defunct DAILY SKETCH and has traversed the gamut of communication practice including team-leading corporate relations in the public, banking, and the oil & gas sectors, where he was central to the design of people-centric decisions, especially during his tenure as the Deputy Executive Secretary of Petroleum Product Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA).

Married to an amazing woman who will equally turn 70 in May, Dr. Adamolekun has been a fellow of NIPR since 1989 and fellow of APRA as well as the Nigerian Institute of Management.

He is also a member of the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE), member of the Board of the Commission on Public Relations Education (CPRE) in Washington, D.C., the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), Chartered Institute of Public Relations, London, and the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

I join thousands of our professional colleagues globally to wish Dr. Adamolekun a happy birthday celebration, and I invite you all, dear friends, to enlist in the celebration of a wondrous Nigerian patriot.

*Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan, Secretary General of APRA, wrote from Abuja