Abdullahi was unveiled at a mini-convention at Chelsea Hotel in Abuja on Thursday to succeeds Lai Mohammed who is now the Minister of Information and Culture.
Here are seven things we know about the new publicity secretary of the ruling All Progressives Congress
1. Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi was born in 1969. He attended University of Lagos, Akoka-Lagos where he graduated with a B.Sc. Second Class Upper degree, in Mass Communication.
2. He started his working career as a volunteer and part-time worker in civil society organizations and international agencies before joining ThisDay newspapers as a reporter in 1997.
In his first year as a journalist, he won a nomination for the Nigerian Media Merit Award for the Best Newspaper Feature of the Year. In 1998, he joined the Africa Leadership Forum, a civil society organization based in Ota, Ogun State as a Publications Officer, and later a Programme Officer. He returned to ThisDay in 2000 as the Deputy Editor of ThisDay on Sunday, and become the Deputy Editor of ThisDay a year later. However, it was for his weekly column, Grains of Wit that he made his mark.
3. In 2001, he won the British Council Chevening Scholarship to study for a postgraduate programme in Governance and Development at the prestigious Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom where in 2002; he bagged a Masters Degree with Distinction.
4. In 2003, he was appointed as the Special Assistant, Communication and Strategy to the Executive Governor of Kwara State, Dr Bukola Saraki, and in 2005, he was appointed Special Adviser on Policy and Strategy to the Governor. As an Assistant to the Governor, he convened the first Kwara Education Summit in 2003, and also served in various committees, including the State Economic Team, which co-ordinated the production of the State Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (SEEDS); and the State Budget Implementation Committee in which he served as its Chairperson.
5. Mallam Abdullahi has written over 1000 newspaper articles. He authored the Nigeria country report for the Transparency International’s Global Corruption Report, 2003.
6. In April 2007, he was appointed as Kwara State Commissioner of Education, Science and Technology, a position he held until May 2011.
7. He was appointed the Minister of Youth Development by former President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, in July 2011.
He was later assigned to the Sports ministry where under his watch Nigeria won the African Nations Cup after a nineteen year drought as well as winning the 2013 FIFA U-17 World Cup. Nigeria also climbed to the number one position in all three categories of athletics under Abdullahi’s tenure as Sports minister.
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