OMONIYI P. IBIETAN (He/Him/His) is a social entrepreneur, activist, journalist, writer, author, academic as well as communication and multistakeholder relationship management specialist. He is currently the head of media relations at the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), secretary general of the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and a member of the Africa regional council of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management – the world’s largest forum of PR and communication specialists with members in 126 countries.

At NCC, he oversees key aspects of the corporate communication strategy focusing on historical and new media, and he was earlier the frontline liaison officer of the Commission with the National Assembly (Nigeria’s bicameral federal legislature), during which he set new standards in legislative relations management.

He was regional media researcher to Freedom House Nigeria Project – Freedom House is United States’ first organisation to champion political rights and civil liberties globally, and it measures state of freedom in 190 countries and other territories. Earlier in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, he was Special Media Advisor to the Federal Minister of Information and Communication, during which he popularised the use of new media in public communication.

As an activist, Dr. Ibietan was a torchbearer in the Nigerian student movement in the late 1980s and the 1990s during which the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) was in organic alliance with progressive forces that resisted unfreedoms and authoritarianism that marked the military regimes of that period – forces that increasingly coalesced to advocate for Nigeria’s current democratic and constitutional government. He was elected the chairman of the NANS convention (popularly called UNITY CONVENTION) at the University of Maiduguri in 2001. The convention brought all warring factions of the Nigerian student organisations together to organise the election that ended almost a decade of multiple power structures, thus restoring NANS’s cherished organisational history.

He obtained a diploma in journalism with distinction from the Nigerian campus of Moscow-Based International Institute of Journalism, earned a BA and MA in Communication Arts and Communication & Language Arts from the Universities of Uyo and Ibadan in Nigeria respectively, graduating atop his classes, and obtained a Ph.D. in Communication from the North-West University in South Africa, specialising in political communication. He is IP3 certified regulation specialist and holds a mini-MBA in telecommunications from NEOTELIS in Paris.

He is a fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR), the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and the African Council for Communication Education (ACCE). He is an Associate Registered Practitioner of Advertising (arpa), a member of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), Nigeria Community Radio Coalition (NCRC) and the International Institute of Communications (IIC) – ‘the world’s only policy debating platform for the converged communications industry’.

His interests in communication scholarship include patterns of political communication in new and historical media, media and culture studies, theories of communication, public relations and advertising, strategic communication, and the philosophical foundations of communication in relation to interpersonal communication management, democracy and freedom. He is on the faculty of the Nigerian campus of the Italy-based Rome Business School.

His first book, SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHY, AND VOTING BEHAVIOUR IN NIGERIA (Washington/Abuja: Premium Times Books) was published in May 2023.

He is reasonably travelled within Africa, North America, Europe, Asia, and extensively within Nigeria.

Husband and dad, he plays tennis, scrabble, likes travelling, reading, writing, and loves meeting people, especially people from ‘other’ cultures.