“Trust is the glue of life. It is the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It is the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” These words, attributed to Stephen R. Covey, speak directly to the challenge confronting institutions, governments and communication professionals in an age of declining confidence.
For much of Nigeria’s modern history, however, the organising metaphor of national wealth has been geological. We have measured prosperity in barrels, mapped opportunity through seismic surveys, interpreted power through proximity to the wells beneath our feet, and built an entire political economy around the premise that the most valuable thing about Nigeria lies underground, waiting to be extracted, refined and distributed through channels controlled by those fortunate enough to command the machinery of extraction.
Oil became more than a natural resource. It became a political language, a developmental theology and, in many respects, the binding imagination of a nation that learned, at considerable cost, to see itself through the lens of what it possessed rather than what it could produce. Yet the defining resource of the age now arriving may not be found beneath the soil at all. It resides within the quality of institutions, the credibility of leaders, the integrity of communication and the accumulated strength of the relationships binding citizens, organisations and governments together across time. That resource is trust. Its stored form is reputational capital, and its custodians, perhaps more urgently than at any previous moment in the life of the modern state, include the practitioners of public relations and strategic communication.
The commemoration of World Public Relations Day on July 16, 2026, therefore presented something richer than an occasion for professional self-congratulation. The global theme, “The Golden Age of Strategic Public Relations,” acknowledged the expanding centrality of communicators in an era defined by institutional fragility, technological disruption, the weaponisation of information and the accelerating erosion of public confidence in the structures through which societies have historically organised their common life. It was a declaration that trust has become one of the most contested, coveted, and consequential resources in the global political economy, and that those who understand how to cultivate it, rather than manufacture or simulate it, occupy a position of strategic consequence that earlier generations of communication professionals could scarcely have imagined.
For Nigeria, the celebration assumes an even more layered significance. The country is preparing to host the 14th World Public Relations Forum in Abuja from November 15 to 21, 2026, under the theme, “Responsible Communication: The Voice of the World.” The Nigerian Institute of Public Relations will unveil its permanent national secretariat, the Public Relations Place, while the University of Public Relations and Leadership, scheduled for inauguration on November 20, will stand as the world’s first specialised institution dedicated exclusively to public relations and leadership formation. Africa’s professional communication bodies, with the NIPR among the founding signatories, have also announced the continent’s first shared charter on responsible communication, the Africa Declaration, which is expected to be formally signed at the Forum.
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These are not trivial achievements. They represent the ambitions of an institution that has refused to remain at the margins of its profession’s global conversation, and they speak to a maturity of professional imagination that deserves acknowledgement. Institutional milestones, however impressive, are only the architecture of a renaissance, not the renaissance itself. The finished edifice, the one that will determine whether this moment becomes genuinely transformative or merely grandly commemorative, must be built from something less visible and far more demanding than conferences convened, declarations signed and buildings commissioned. It must be constructed from the harder, less glamorous and more consequential material of daily professional practice.
The evolution of public relations in Nigeria mirrors the changing character of the country itself. It has been uneven and contested, marked by extraordinary peaks of aspiration and stubborn valleys of institutional inertia. In its earlier expressions, the profession was frequently confined to the outer edges of decision-making. Practitioners, however gifted, were typically summoned after policies had been conceived, approved and sometimes already poorly implemented.
Their assignment was often to explain the inexplicable, defend the indefensible or secure favourable coverage for institutions whose conduct had already weakened the credibility of the messages they were being asked to amplify. Communication was consequently treated less as a strategic management function and more as a sophisticated form of institutional housekeeping.
This narrow inheritance created a damaging confusion that has not entirely disappeared. Many Nigerians, including some in positions of organisational leadership who ought to know better, still understand public relations as a synonym for propaganda, image laundering or the management of appearances on behalf of powerful actors unwilling to be held accountable for their conduct.
The communicator, in this conception, is not a counsellor but a craftsman of favourable impressions, a vendor of convenient narratives and an agent of institutional self-promotion dressed in the borrowed language of strategic communication. The profession has, nevertheless, travelled considerably beyond that limited inheritance, and intellectual honesty demands that this progress be acknowledged without being romanticised.
Public relations is increasingly recognised within sophisticated organisations and advanced professional communities as a management function concerned with relationships, legitimacy, stakeholder expectations, risk architecture, organisational culture and long-term reputational sustainability. The practitioner is no longer merely a transmitter of institutional information. At the highest level of the discipline, the practitioner is an interpreter of the social environment, a custodian of institutional meaning, an analyst of reputational risk and a source of ethical counsel whose value lies partly in the courage to tell powerful institutions what they may not wish to hear.
Nigeria’s successful bid to host the World Public Relations Forum, as only the second African country to receive this honour, represents a genuine movement from the periphery towards the centre of the global professional conversation. Statutory recognition in 1990 provided the formal foundation, while decades of practitioner formation, continuing professional development and institutional partnership have gradually expanded the profession’s scope. What the Forum represents is recognition by the international community that Nigeria has something substantive to contribute to the global conversation about communication, reputation and trust.
Movement towards the centre, however, brings greater responsibility than movement from it. Visibility must be matched by substance, hosting rights must be translated into intellectual leadership, and institutional prestige must be accompanied by the ethical authority that comes only from being seen to embody in daily practice the values proclaimed in formal addresses. Nigeria must therefore do more than host the conversation about responsible communication. Its institutions and practitioners must increasingly become that conversation, embodied through their decisions, professional standards and relationships with the publics they claim to serve.
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In more than fifteen years of practice and scholarship at the intersection of political economy and strategic communication, I have come to regard one observation as among the most important and consistently underappreciated truths of Nigerian public affairs. Nigeria’s development challenge has repeatedly been framed as a resource problem.
We speak of insufficient petroleum revenue, inadequate foreign direct investment, weak physical infrastructure, limited human capital and deficient institutional capacity. These diagnoses are accurate as far as they go, but they do not go far enough because they consistently overlook the deficit that underlies and compounds almost every other deficit on the list. That deeper deficit is a crisis of trust.
Consider what a trust deficit actually costs. Foreign investors who might otherwise deploy capital in Nigerian markets attach a political and institutional risk premium that raises the cost of capital, reduces investment and slows economic growth. Citizens who have learned through painful experience not to trust formal institutions may pay directly for healthcare rather than participate in insurance systems they fear will fail them when they are most vulnerable. Small businesses and microenterprises remain within the informal economy not only because formalisation is procedurally burdensome, but also because formalisation makes them visible to institutions they do not trust to treat them fairly. Depositors, as financial inclusion campaigns have repeatedly demonstrated, may keep cash outside the banking system not because they are ignorant of banking, but because they are rational actors responding to a low-trust institutional environment.
A low-trust society pays an invisible tax on almost every public and private transaction.
It is a tax collected not directly by government, but by the accumulated weight of broken promises, opaque decisions, unfulfilled commitments and the sustained gap between what institutions say about themselves and what citizens experience when they interact with them. This is not merely a moral observation, although it has profound moral implications. It is a structural and developmental reality because trust functions as social and economic infrastructure.
Where trust is strong, transactions become cheaper, policies receive a fair hearing, institutional explanations are not automatically dismissed, crises are absorbed with greater resilience and recovery occurs more rapidly. Where trust is weak, every interaction becomes more expensive, every announcement is greeted with suspicion, rumours travel faster than verified information, and the communicator is forced to struggle against the accumulated scepticism that previous failures have deposited in the public imagination.
Public relations, at its highest level of practice, is therefore not primarily in the business of managing perception. It is in the business of co-creating trust by helping organisations align their behaviour with their communication so that reputation becomes the natural and deserved outcome of credible institutional conduct.
This distinction is fundamental, yet too much of what passes for public relations practice in Nigeria has not fully embraced it. Considerable professional work remains trapped in the old paradigm of message management, visibility chasing, defensive communication and the cultivation of favourable media atmospherics around institutional conduct that has not yet earned the favourable public judgment being sought. Too many organisations celebrate communication units that produce excellent campaigns while the underlying behaviour those campaigns are meant to represent remains unchanged. Too many communicators are employed to clean the windows while the rooms behind them remain in urgent need of renovation.
Reputation is not simply what an institution says about itself. It is the cumulative public interpretation of how that institution behaves consistently over time, particularly under circumstances in which inconsistency is tempting and honesty is inconvenient. I make this observation not as an external critic but as a practitioner who has spent years navigating the tensions of institutional communication from within. I have sat in rooms where communication was treated as a crisis-management instrument, summoned only after the crisis had already formed. I have watched brilliant campaigns falter, not because the communication was poorly conceived or executed, but because the behaviour it was meant to represent did not correspond with the lived experience of the stakeholders it was designed to persuade.
The communicator must therefore cease to be positioned merely as a problem-solver and must increasingly become a problem-preventer, not only a fire extinguisher but an integral component of institutional fire safety. The frontier of genuine professional practice lies precisely at the boundary between perception management and reputation governance. Nigeria must cross that boundary decisively if the golden age being proclaimed is to retain meaning beyond the duration of commemorative speeches and professional celebrations.
It would be intellectually dishonest to interpret these observations as evidence that progress has been illusory or that celebration is unwarranted. The current moment in Nigerian public relations represents genuine institutional renewal of a kind that should neither be dismissed nor diminished.
The University of Public Relations and Leadership has the potential to become what the profession has long lacked, a genuine centre of scholarship rooted in Nigerian and African realities. A profession becomes truly consequential when it develops not only competent practitioners but also institutions of knowledge capable of interrogating practice, producing original theory, documenting local experience and educating future leaders who understand not merely how communication works, but why trust matters and what societies lose when institutions fail to maintain it.
Nigeria and Africa require communication scholarship that takes seriously the particular challenges of communicating in societies where formal institutions coexist with traditional authority, where oral culture remains constitutive rather than supplementary, where religious and ethnic identities powerfully influence the interpretation of public messages, and where distrust of government has been reinforced by lived experience across generations. Imported frameworks remain useful and intellectually valuable, but they cannot constitute the whole story. African realities must become a source of theory, not merely a destination for theories developed elsewhere.
The World Public Relations Forum also places Nigeria under international scrutiny of a kind that can function as a powerful catalyst for professional reform if it is approached with seriousness rather than pageantry. Thousands of delegates from countries across the world will arrive in Abuja in November. They will observe what Nigeria presents, but they will also perceive what Nigeria is. The difference between institutional presentation and institutional reality, where such a difference exists, will not be invisible to visitors experienced in reading the realities behind official narratives.
The Africa Declaration on responsible communication similarly has the potential to become a foundational continental charter grounded in a distinctly African philosophy of communication. Such a philosophy must take seriously truth, human dignity, communal responsibility, cultural sensitivity, inclusion and developmental purpose. Africa should not merely consume ethical frameworks developed elsewhere. It should contribute to their construction from a position of intellectual, cultural and experiential authority. Every renaissance, however, carries a recurring danger: the possibility that celebrating renewal may become a substitute for undertaking the sustained, uncomfortable and frequently unglamorous work required to achieve it.
The real test of this renaissance will therefore begin after the speeches have ended, the declarations have been signed, the photographs have been taken and the international delegates have returned to their home countries with whatever impressions of Nigeria they carry. At that point, professional renewal must be visible not merely in institutional architecture but in ethical conduct, intellectual output, measurable improvements in practice and the courage with which communication professionals confront the contradictions within the institutions they serve.
Any serious reflection on the future of public relations that fails to reckon with artificial intelligence would amount to intellectual evasion. Artificial intelligence is transforming the operational landscape of communication at a pace that has already outrun many of the ethical and regulatory frameworks intended to govern it. The capacities it offers, including faster research, richer media monitoring, sophisticated sentiment analysis, precise audience segmentation and rapid content adaptation, are genuine and significant.
These technologies will make the mechanical dimensions of communication faster, cheaper and, in some respects, more precise than they have ever been.
The democratisation of communication technology, however, also democratises deception. Synthetic audio, deepfake video, automated propaganda, fabricated documentary evidence and algorithmically generated content can now be designed not to inform but to manipulate, not to clarify but to fragment, and not to build trust but to exploit and corrode it.
The public communicator of the emerging decade will not operate merely in an environment of competing narratives. He or she will work within an environment of permanent and potentially weaponised doubt, a condition in which the question is no longer simply which version of events should be believed, but whether a reported event occurred at all.
This is the crisis of authenticity that strategic communication must learn to navigate. It is a crisis that artificial intelligence cannot independently resolve because artificial intelligence has, in important respects, helped to create and intensify it. Machines can generate language at extraordinary speed and volume, but they cannot bear moral responsibility for the consequences of that language.
They can identify patterns in audience sentiment with impressive precision, but they cannot fully appreciate the symbolic weight of particular words within communities shaped by specific histories of trauma, aspiration, grievance or betrayal. They can recommend a message, but they cannot carry the burden of conscience when that message misleads a public that trusted the institution delivering it.
The enduring and irreplaceable value of the strategic communication professional will therefore not lie in producing content faster than a machine. Machines will inevitably produce more content at lower cost. Human professional value will lie in judgment, ethical reasoning, cultural intelligence, relationship capital and, above all, the courage to tell powerful institutions what they may not wish to hear. This capacity requires not only technical competence but also moral character, contextual understanding and professional independence, none of which can be delegated entirely to technology.
The NIPR should consequently treat the development of a Charter on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in Strategic Communication not as a distant aspiration but as an urgent professional obligation. Such a charter should address the disclosure of synthetic content, the protection of personal data, algorithmic bias within communication systems, structured protocols for misinformation response, mandatory human oversight of AI-generated institutional communication, intellectual property in AI-assisted content and the non-negotiable responsibility of practitioners for every communication issued under their authority, regardless of the tools used in its production.
Nigeria now has an opportunity, from the Global South, to help lead this conversation rather than wait, as has too often happened, to receive standards developed elsewhere and delivered as universal prescriptions for societies whose conditions those standards were never designed to address. Leadership in responsible communication must mean helping to shape the ethical future of the technologies transforming the profession, not merely adapting to decisions made by others.
For the present renaissance to become a genuine transformation rather than a sophisticated rebranding of familiar limitations, Nigerian public relations must accomplish a transition that is as cultural as it is technical. It must move from perception management to reputation governance. Perception management asks how an institution can persuade people to see it differently, whereas reputation governance asks what the institution must become, and how it must behave consistently over time, to deserve a different public judgment.
The difference between these questions is the difference between the cosmetic and the constitutive, because perception management works largely with surfaces while reputation governance addresses foundations.
This transition requires practitioners to participate meaningfully at the earlier stages of institutional decision-making. Communication must be integrated into policy design, organisational strategy, risk assessment, stakeholder mapping and institutional reform planning.
This is not because communicators seek to expand their professional territory, but because institutions that fail to understand their stakeholders before taking consequential decisions routinely produce the very crises they later summon communicators to manage.
The transition also requires courageous counsel of the kind that a profession comfortable only with managing public reaction may find difficult to deliver. The strategic communication adviser must be capable of telling a client or institutional leader that a promise is unrealistic, a claim is factually unsupportable, a community has not been consulted, a silence is being interpreted as guilt rather than discretion, or that leadership conduct is creating a widening contradiction between declared organisational values and lived stakeholder experience. Professional loyalty does not mean protecting organisations from uncomfortable truths.
It means protecting them from the more damaging consequences of avoiding those truths until they can no longer be concealed or managed. The NIPR must equally deepen the substance of professionalisation beyond the formalism of statutory recognition and membership registration. Enforceable ethical standards, meaningful professional sanctions, rigorous continuing professional development and a clearer publicly communicated distinction between trained professionals and the unlicensed publicity operatives, political propagandists and influence merchants who increasingly populate the communication ecosystem are not optional additions to the professional agenda.
They are preconditions for the credibility the Institute claims to champion. A membership body whose standards are not meaningfully enforceable communicates, by its own example, a troubling message about the value it places on the accountability it professes.
Professional measurement must also advance beyond the comfortable proxies of media mentions, volume of coverage and ceremonial visibility that dominate evaluation in many Nigerian organisations. Public relations outcomes should increasingly be assessed through stakeholder confidence surveys, evidence of behavioural change, policy comprehension research, employee engagement metrics, conflict-reduction indicators and institutional resilience demonstrated under pressure.
The golden age being proclaimed must eventually be supported by evidence of improved institutional conduct and measurably stronger stakeholder relationships. What is not measured is easily romanticised, and a profession that cannot demonstrate its value in terms extending beyond the vanity metrics of visibility will remain vulnerable to misunderstanding, underinvestment and the budget reductions that accompany periods of economic difficulty.
Nigeria is right to celebrate. The country has secured a global platform of genuine significance, is constructing institutions of professional identity and knowledge, and is positioning itself as a potential African hub for responsible communication and reputation governance. These are consequential achievements, and they deserve acknowledgement from every member of the professional community who understands how long and demanding the journey to this point has been. Celebration, however, must mark the beginning of more serious work rather than become a substitute for it.
Trust cannot be extracted by drilling into the earth. It must be cultivated through the sustained daily relationship between what institutions promise and what they consistently deliver. It grows when organisations tell the truth before circumstances compel them to do so, because voluntary candour is the form of institutional honesty that builds confidence rather than merely managing damage. It expands when leaders listen before they speak, recognising that the communicator’s first and most important skill is not persuasion but comprehension. It deepens when errors are acknowledged without equivocation, citizens are treated as stakeholders rather than passive audiences, and communication functions as an instrument of mutual understanding rather than unilateral institutional persuasion.
The wells beneath our feet gave Nigeria wealth that was real, transformative in certain dimensions of national life and deeply instructive in demonstrating how an economy organised around extraction can simultaneously generate abundance and frustrate development. Those wells taught us what physical resources can accomplish, but they also revealed with painful clarity what such resources cannot produce. They cannot build the institutional confidence that makes a legal system worthy of voluntary compliance, create the civic faith that makes democratic governance more than a periodic procedure, generate the corporate credibility that makes a brand more than a registered trademark, or establish the social trust that enables communities to absorb shocks without fracturing.
Nigeria’s future wealth, the wealth that will determine whether the ambitions of the next generation are fulfilled or disappointed, will increasingly depend on the confidence the country inspires in those who encounter its institutions, the relationships those institutions sustain over time and the reputations they earn through the accumulated quality of their conduct.
Public relations practitioners are not the sole authors of that future. Trust is ultimately produced by leadership decisions, policy quality, institutional competence, the administration of justice and the thousands of small acts of organisational integrity that constitute credible behaviour over time.
The profession nevertheless occupies a strategic position at the intersection of these forces. From that position, it can help institutions understand their publics with greater depth, align conduct with declared values more faithfully, communicate complexity with the honesty that complexity requires and recognise reputational risks before they mature into institutional crises. This is both the promise and the obligation of the public relations renaissance Nigeria is marking and, in important respects, beginning to construct.
Its golden age will not ultimately be declared by the brilliance of campaigns produced, the number of awards received or the grandeur of forums convened.
It will be earned quietly and cumulatively when the counsel of Nigerian communication professionals helps produce organisations genuinely worthy of belief, governments capable of sustaining credibility and institutions strong enough to carry the weight of a society in which responsible communication has become a recognised and enforceable pillar of national development.
Nigeria has secured the moment, is constructing the institutions and is preparing to convene the world. The harder, more consequential and ultimately more defining task is to cultivate the one resource that no country can simply purchase, no campaign can permanently counterfeit, and no technology, however sophisticated, can manufacture in the absence of the institutional behaviour that alone makes it real. That resource is trust that has been earned, and its accumulated expression is a reputation that has been deserved.
This is the frontier from which Nigeria’s public relations renaissance must ultimately be judged. Warren Buffett famously warned that it takes many years to build a reputation but only a few minutes to destroy it, adding that greater awareness of this reality would compel people to act differently. Nigeria’s institutions, leaders and communication professionals must now act with precisely that awareness, because beyond the wells beneath our feet lies a more enduring national resource: the confidence of a people who have been given sufficient reason to believe.
Haruna, PhD, mnipr, a political economist and corporate communications practitioner, writes from Minna, Niger State, and can be reached at msquare1306@gmail.com
