He remains in the pantheon of torchbearers and those who enriched our history and corpus of knowledge. His transition leaves a gap in mentorship, scholarship, practice, advocacy, and organisational management in the communication management ecosystem in Africa. His spirit is very rare. We will mind the gap and rededicate ourselves to raising the banner of his philosophical, didactic, pragmatic, and organisational spirit.
I received with shock and resultant deep grief, the news of the transition of Mallam Kabir Dangogo in the wee hours of 7 March. If I want to sound official, I will say Mallam Dangogo was one of my predecessors as Secretary General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA). Indeed, he was Nigeria’s first Secretary General of FAPRA, the forerunner of APRA, and expectedly the continental body of professionals and practitioners of public relations is already treating this as a tragedy and putting it in historic context beginning with the letter of condolence dispatched to his family.
But Mallam was my mentor, an uncommon enabler, on whose wings many of us rode to recognition in professional practice and to the centre of APRA as the organising principle for public relations offerings in Africa. It was he who handed me over to Dr Wole Adamolekun, who succeeded him as APRA’s scribe, though I had known him earlier at the height of my twitchy spirit and itinerant activism. I refer to the time I wanted to do everything under the sun to remake Nigeria. To that extent, Dangogo was our ‘Mwalimu’, a special teacher, and a Socratic mentor.
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In APRA, before Dangogo, Nigeria had the legendary Sam Epelle, the inimitable Bob Ogbuagu, and the trailblazing Mike Okereke. When on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the formation of the International Public Relations Association (IPRA), the global body took its Council Meeting and General Assembly to Nairobi in June 1975, Epelle was there to fly the Nigeria flag. Epelle, with his colleagues, Jesse Opembe (Kenya), first chairman (president) of Federation of African Public Relations Association (FAPRA), and Carl Reindorf (Ghana), first secretary general and others from Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritius, South Africa, Rhodesia (the colonial name of today’s Zimbabwe), Uganda and Zambia, founded FAPRA, as it then was.
Thus, 10 African countries, on the 10th of June 1975, seized the auspiciousness of the IPRA historic forum to reshape the history of public relations on the continent. The second conference could not take place until five years later in Lagos. Ogbuagu was elected president at the third conference in Accra in 1981, and Okereke was elected president in 1990 in Abuja. Okereke set up a befitting FAPRA secretariat with the appointment of an executive director, Ben Eke, a retired director of Public Relations at the Nigerian Federal Ministry of Information. Okereke’s term also witnessed the regular organisation of robust conferences and expansion of the participatory/democratic space (that started during Ogbuagu’s chairmanship) to foster inclusivity.
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Conferences took place in Kampala in 1991; Abidjan, 1992; Dakar, 1993 (a revolutionary forum that shaped finance, membership and voting policies, as well as set the tone for re-christening and remaking of APRA); Accra in 1994; Kenya in 1995; and Zimbabwe in 1996. I will stop here to refocus on Mallam Dangogo and pray that I have the grace to write about a number of accomplishments of some of our leaders in their lifetimes. They are many and include, Mazi Mike Okereke, Wole Olaoye, Kate Bapela, Wole Adamolekun, Peter Munywoki Mutie, Yomi Badejo-Okusanya, Robyn de villers, Jane Gitau, Ike Neliaku, and so on.
Today, the brass tack is Mallam Dangogo, our soft-spoken, unassuming enabler, uncommon teacher and mentor, a willing uplifter, who ever so often offered his shoulders to others to climb to success. Mallam was avuncular, non-tribalistic, egalitarian, and therefore ecumenical in spirit, through and through. He was kind but tough. I think his mentee, Dr Nkechi Ali-Balogun, must have acquired that oxymoronic character trait from him. He was principled but very fair, thoroughly firm, and unapologetically forthright – values that he brought to NIPR and APRA to nudge us to thrive beyond our imagination.
It was Dangogo who became more restless than others towards remaking FAPRA, especially from 1997 when the Association suffered terminal decline. Strangely, quite unfortunately and inexplicably, Okereke’s successor did not only take his eyes off the ball, but also practically dropped the ball. I hope history will be kinder to him and his colleagues whenever we discover what exactly happened. Anyway, Dangogo, a leading light in the re-mobilisation efforts that rallied revolutionary elements and other enthusiasts, came to the rescue of the Association from a five-year moribundity. As a major re-awakening of the historic continental body from recession, Dangogo, who was elected secretary general at Accra in 2003, had been mandated earlier in 2002, alongside Ghana’s Joseph Allotey-Pappoe, who was elected president also in 2003, to “constitute a coordinating team to reorganise the Association.”
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In 2004, Dangogo hosted his comrades and professional colleagues in Abuja, where the 17th All Africa Public Relations Conference took place. Since that time, the Association has never suffered dormancy. In 2006, at the 19th Conference in Johannesburg, while Ghana’s Allotey-Pappoe was re-elected president, Dangogo, though eminently qualified for re-election, stepped down from office as secretary general and nudged Dr Wole Adamolekun to run for the office. With his support of his colleagues, Adamolekun continued the reformation and, particularly, the Association’s secretariat sustainability project, with fervour. At the 20th conference in Kampala in 2007, “FAPRA Council resolved to move the headquarters of FAPRA to Nigeria after 32 years” of being headquartered in Kenya – an idea that had been muted by Okereke and his colleagues, alongside the need to democratise the organisational membership. The progressive elements had insisted that FAPRA should embrace individual membership, like IPRA and CIPR of the United Kingdom, to be able to sustain its financial obligations, rather than maintaining institutional membership and the meagre contribution that comes with annual subscription.
By the reckoning of key actors in APRA at that time, choosing Nigeria as the secretariat of APRA was the best way to prevent the Association from slipping back to recession because of the country’s tendency for playing the Big Brother role in the continent. So, many trusted Nigeria to preserve the Association. Nigeria, thus, became the secretariat of the Association, though you do not have to be a Nigerian to be elected the secretary general. Indeed, Jane Gitau of Kenya and Henry Rugamba of Uganda have been elected and served as secretaries general of APRA. In the pre-Reformation era, Ghana’s Carl Reindorf and Kafui Asem, as well as Kenya’s John H, Mramba, among others, also served as secretaries general at different times.
At the 21st conference in Kumasi in 2008, Kate Bapela of the Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa was elected president, the first female to assume such responsibility, and Dr Adamolekun was re-elected secretary general. While the idea of reforms to foster broader participation of all professionals from all parts of Africa had been a recurring matter right from Ogbuagu’s tenure, when the first attempt to decentralise FAPRA’s governance was muted and implemented, arguably the Kampala conference produced the concrete resolution to change FAPRA to APRA. Re-christened the Association for African Public Relations Practitioners (AAPRP), its trading name became the African Public Relations Association (APRA) following the efforts of Dangogo and Adamolekun. It is to the credit of Adamolekun, with Dangogo’s mentorship, that the resolution was implemented with speed and precision to ensure that APRA did not suffer a further reversal of fortune.
While the decentralisation project had been a popular advocacy since the 1980s, it got a stronger fillip and concrete expression during Dangogo’s secretary generalship, when APRA had three vice presidents for West, East and Southern Africa respectively, as well as a director of Programmes, director of Public Relations and treasurer. Dangogo has also been given the credit for ‘bringing’ South Africa to the APRA fold when the Association recovered from its dormancy. Dangogo seized every opportunity to encourage professional colleagues in Southern Africa, particularly from the Republic of South Africa, to attend APRA events. These mentoring yielded fruits when Kate Bapela became vice president and later president of APRA.
Born in Katsina in February 1949, Dangogo earned academic degrees from Ohio University in Athens, USA, and University of Leicester, United Kingdom. He traversed the gamut of communication management practice and scholarship, starting with journalism, then advertising and public relations. He worked with the Nigerian Television Authority (Africa’s largest television network) and later joined the New Nigerian newspapers, a leading print medium of the 1970s and 1980s, where he was Managing Editor in the late 1980s. Dangogo also taught journalism and communication studies at Kaduna Polytechnic, one of Nigeria’s leading tertiary institutions. He became a press adviser to the United States Information Service (USIS) in 1990.
Dangogo’s sojourn in corporate public relations was also seminal. He worked with two leading banks in Nigeria – Bank of the North and Union Bank – where he was a leading light of the organisations’ corporate affairs managements. His stint in the banking sector became consequential when he rallied his colleagues in other banks to form one of the most influential groups in Nigeria’s financial sector – the Association of Corporate Affairs Managers of Banks (ACAMB). He was elected ACAMB’s first president, and he used the platform to mentor many young people in financial public relations. His first book, Beyond Banking Hall, captured his experience in that sector and thereafter. He established Timex Communications to enhance knowledge production and share about global standards in public relations and communication management. He is on record to have said that public relations transcends crafting impeccable press releases, but it is a profession built on the doctrinal tripod of decorum, ethics, and professionalism.
A towering personality, Dangogo became a fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) in the year 2000 and earlier in 1981, he was elected a fellow of the International Radio and Television Society in New York. He was equally a fellow of the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON). As the Chairman of the Nigerian Chapter of the International Public Relations Association and subsequently Secretary General of APRA, Dangogo was noted for bespoke value creation, integrity, and reputational uptakes. Mallam Kabir Dangogo received many awards and would certainly be one of the most celebrated and decorated professionals in the annals of public relations and communication management in Africa.
The avalanche of condolence messages, tributes, eulogies, and associated memorialisations attest to derivable benefits of the life, times, and works. He remains in the pantheon of torchbearers and those who enriched our history and corpus of knowledge. His transition leaves a gap in mentorship, scholarship, practice, advocacy, and organisational management in the communication management ecosystem in Africa. His spirit is very rare. We will mind the gap and rededicate ourselves to raising the banner of his philosophical, didactic, pragmatic, and organisational spirit. May his family and friends be comforted. May his soul rest in peace.
Omoniyi Ibietan is the secretary general, African Public Relations Association (APRA).
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