By Emmanuel Adeleke
The management of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has appointed Reuben Muoka, as its new director of public affairs.
This was contained in a statement signed by the Chief Executive Officer of the commission, Prof. Umar Danbatta, on Thursday.
Muoka takes over from Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde, who has assumed duties as the director of special duties at the commission.
The new NCC’s spokesman was recently promoted as substantive director, alongside Ismail Adedigba, now director of research and development; and Gwa-Tobi Mohammed, who has also assumed duties as director/secretary to the board of the commission.
Muoka was in 2021, appointed to head the special duties department, which superintends the international relations unit; emergency communication Clxentres Ulunit; public private partnership unit; and security services unit of the commission.
He was promoted as director in the department before his current redeployment to lead the public affairs department, the arm of the commission mandated to manage the image and visibility of Nigeria’s telecom regulator and a leading light of the Nigerian public service.
Muoka is expected to bring his rich and versatile experience in both specialised and traditional journalism, public relations, integrated marketing communications (IMC), corporate communication and people management, to bear on the commission’s vision to expand the frontiers of its public goodwill and the impact of its reputational assets.
A former deputy communications editor of the Vanguard Newspapers, former deputy general manager at MTS First Wireless (Nigeria’s first mobile telephone operator), Muoka joined the NCC in 2007 as a principal manager, and was deployed to the public affairs department where he headed the media and public relations unit.
He later rose from the rank of principal manager to the position of an assistant director in 2010, and by 2015, as a deputy director, appointed to head the re-engineered public relations unit of PAD. In 2017, he was redeployed to the policy, competition and economic analysis department to head the economic analysis unit of department.
Muoka earned M.Sc. degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, specialising in public relations and advertising, where he had earlier successfully completed a Postgraduate Diploma (PGD) in the same field of Mass Communication. Earlier, he had obtained a bachelor’s degree in Performing Arts at the University of Ilorin.
As a mark of his distinctive journalism career, Muoka received a fellowship of the Egyptian Embassy in Nigeria to undertake a Pan-African training and tour of Egypt in 1999, leading to an award of a continental Diploma Certificate in Journalism at the instance of the Egyptian Ministry of Information, and the African Journalists Union (AJU) in Cairo, Egypt.
The focused, innovative and illuminating coverage and analysis of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the pre and immediate post liberalisation period of telecoms industry in Nigeria is credited to the insights of visionary journalists like Muoka, whose pioneering initiative led to the establishment and institutionalisation of the Hi-Tech Desk in Vanguard Newspapers in late 1990s.
As the Chairman of the League of Communications Correspondents (LECCO), Muoka led his colleagues to give voice and focus to the advocacy for the liberalisation and deregulation of the telecoms industry in Nigeria in the 1990s.
During his active days in journalism at Vanguard Newspapers, Muoka served concurrently as Africa’s contributing editor to the London-based Communications Week for four years beginning from 1998, during which he undertook copious reportage of the African telecoms landscape. The London-based magazine shared Muoka’s work to an enthusiastic global audience in a rare showcase of Africa’s promise as a flourishing point for the emergent converging telecommunications industry.
Between 1995 and 2001, Muoka leveraged his expertise to provide part-time public relations consultancy to notable companies and institutions in the telecommunications industry, including the Nigerian Mobile Communications Limited, Abuja; Multi-links Telecommunications Limited, Lagos; Satellite Telecommunications Limited, Lagos; Pulse Marketing Communications Ltd, Lagos; and the Nigerian Communications Commission, Abuja, years before he joined the commission as a staff.
Muoka is a member of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ); a full member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (mnipr); and an associate member of the Registered Practitioners of Advertising (arpa), regulated by the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON).
The CEO of NCC, Danbatta, on behalf of the board and management of the commission, congratulated Muoka on his new role and look forward to working closely with him and his team in public affairs department, as key internal stakeholders in the commission’s re-engineering processes to meet and surpass Federal Government’s expectations for a robust telecommunications sector and a remarkably emergent digital economy.
