Deputy Provost of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ), Dr. Dele Omojuyigbe will be launching his latest book on Wednesday.
The book titled ‘NIJ’s Inside Story…from my lenses…The Beaut, The Bend’, was reviewed by Dr. (Mrs) Khadijat Adedeji-Olona and will be launched in the school auditorium in Ogba.
According to him, it is a diary-generated paperback spiced with research and a few stakeholders’ narratives.
Revealing why he wrote the book in a Facebook post, he said: “It is written with a view to contributing to scholarship and providing resource for research. The book doesn’t claim to display NIJ’s unabridged philosophy under any guise but instead prides itself on having useful contents about the old and the new NIJ with fact as its forte, telling the institution’s larger story in a succinct but instructive manner, and touching hidden, inconsequential, individual areas which poignantly create a huge impression.
“The book takes its bearing from the author’s prying lenses to narrate the institution’s story concealed hitherto in snippets, rumours, and anecdotes, with a pinch of personal accounts.”
Dr. Omojuyigbe disclosed that it is an intermixture of historical NIJ and contemporary NIJ; meaning that the institution as a professional institute from 1971-2000, and as an academic institution supervised by the NBTE from 2004-2024.
“The first part is drawn from research on old NIJ, adding to it the story of journalism-training institutions in Nigeria before NIJ arrived, while the second part is an eye-witness account of the present NIJ, as I have obsessively kept diaries of major events at the institution since I joined its faculty in 2004. We started the journey together as an NBTE-approved institution,” the scholar explained.
He elucidated that foremost actors in the NIJ project from 1971 to 2024 are identified in the book, not forgetting the feats of selected, outstanding old students working in the media, local and international which can be found in Chapter 2 and 14 respectively.
The communication expert also revealed that the names of all NIJ graduates from 2004 to 2021 are published in the book, covering the six convocations thus far – 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2018, and 2021, which cuts across different programmes such as National Diploma (ND), Higher National Diploma (HND), Post Graduate (PGD), EWC, and PCPj.
He further stated that the book contains NIJ’s policies, programmes, collaborations, influences, appointments, staff, students to mention but a few.
