NPRW: Insights From the Kaduna Youth Forum on Nigeria’s Substance Abuse Response
By Mohammed Dahiru Lawal
The excitement of attending the third Nigeria Public Relations Week (NPRW) 2026 came loaded with its own reflections and commitments — the core PR and journalistic functions of conducting interviews, reporting consistently, keeping track of panel sessions and keynote speeches, while learning and networking. Nothing, however, prepared me for the ambush that awaited me on day one: a seat on a panel I had not signed up for.
Attending such events within a community of practice like this normally comes with the familiar warmth of recognisable faces and the pleasant obligation of exchanging pleasantries. I had barely tagged along behind my boss, Alhaji Yushau Shuaib, as we alighted on the ever-bubbling campus of Kaduna State University for the NPRW Kaduna Youth Forum themed “From Vulnerability to Productivity: Addressing Drug Abuse Through Youth Engagement” when the unmistakable voice of Mallam Ahmed Balarabe Sa’id cut through the crowd. He greeted my boss with familiar enthusiasm and grabbed me by the hand before I could fully orient myself.
“I’m glad you are here. We are going to put you on a panel,” he declared, with the quiet authority of a man accustomed to making things happen. He sought only a subtle nod from my boss, who gave it heartily.
Sa’id, a prominent Nigerian communication strategist, academic, and media professional, wasted no time. He handed me over to the event moderators, who began taking my details, and in short order I was accredited to appear on the panel alongside Abbigail Sabbah John, a youth advocate and social entrepreneur with practical experience in youth development, advocacy, and community mobilisation, and Anna Husseini Pai, Executive Director of the Yargote Foundation.
“You are a very strong voice. You need to share it on this platform,” Mallam Sa’id said to me before disappearing into the crowd to attend to a dozen other things.
His words were generous, but I knew that a strong voice alone is insufficient. What a panel of this nature demands is insight and perspective grounded enough to enrich both the audience and the organisers, who should ideally be translating panel recommendations into policy documents. The session I was assigned to, “Issues Behind Youth Vulnerability to Substance Abuse, Life After Rehabilitation, and the Role of Families, Schools, and Religious and Traditional Institutions”, was not a territory I had professionally inhabited. I have not worked in drug law enforcement, rehabilitation, or the regulatory space. But my years as a professional journalist, fact-checker, and open-source intelligence practitioner gave me a useful vantage point: the ability to examine complex social issues dispassionately, to interrogate dominant narratives, and to follow the evidence where it leads.
My central submission was this: we have consistently treated substance abuse as a moral failing rather than as a structural crisis, and that misdiagnosis is precisely why our interventions keep falling short.
Substance abuse among young people is not simply a story of bad choices. It is, far more often, a symptom of structural stress — unemployment, insecurity, identity crisis, and social dislocation. Many young Nigerians are not getting high for pleasure; they are self-medicating against economic frustration, unprocessed trauma, and a suffocating uncertainty about the future. Layered on top of that is a normalisation effect driven by pop culture, peer influence, and increasingly, by the relentless logic of digital platforms that monetise sensation without regard for consequence.
On rehabilitation, I made the point that we have a habit of treating it as the finish line, when it is actually the starting pistol for the hardest phase of recovery. Re-entry into society, with its stigma, its economic barriers, and its unresolved triggers, is where many individuals relapse, not because the rehabilitation failed, but because the environment they returned to was never made ready to receive them.
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The family, I argued, sits at this critical junction. It can be either the first line of defence or the first line of failure. Some families enable abuse through denial; others reinforce it through shame and stigma that drives substance use further underground. Many simply lack the awareness to recognise early warning signs before a crisis sets in. This is why drug education curricula in schools, trained counsellors and psychologists in communities, and sustained awareness campaigns are not optional extras; they are structural necessities. Religious and traditional institutions, with their enormous reach and moral authority in Nigerian society, have a particularly powerful role to play in entrenching values and eroding the normalisation of substance abuse.
Before the panel convened, however, a sharp and instructive debate had already broken out on the main floor. The Director-General of the Kaduna State Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (KADSAMHSA), in his keynote address, suggested that advocacy and awareness campaigns had not been sufficiently effective in curbing drug addiction in Nigeria. He argued that government efforts must prioritise the root causes of substance abuse — poverty, unemployment, and peer pressure.
The remark drew an immediate and equally forceful response from Mallam Jibrin Baba Ndace, Director-General of Voice of Nigeria (VON). Ndace challenged the premise directly, arguing that no meaningful policy, programme, or social intervention can succeed without sustained communication and public sensitisation. “There is no campaign, whether in health, technology, or social development, that can succeed without awareness creation. Advocacy remains central to behavioural change,” he said. He further observed that the Kaduna Youth Forum itself was a living act of advocacy, which rather made his point for him.
Both positions, to my mind, are not as opposed as the heat of the exchange suggested. Structural intervention and communication strategy are not rivals; they are interdependent. You cannot fix what people do not understand, and you cannot sustain what communities do not own.
What lent the occasion additional resonance was a milestone that landed in the same news cycle: Nigeria achieved a significant public relations victory as the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) won Gold in the Crisis and Issues Management category at the 2026 Africa SABRE Awards in South Africa. Its “War Against Drug Abuse” campaign, executed by Image Merchants Promotion Limited (IMPR), was commended for strategic clarity, strong public engagement, and effective perception management during a sensitive security period. The judges noted that the initiative demonstrated how evidence-based communication can build public trust while tackling complex threats like drug trafficking and abuse , which is, in essence, the argument Ndace had just made on the floor in Kaduna.
The forum itself drew over 200 students from tertiary institutions across the region, and the energy in the Faculty of Arts theatre was unmistakable. Among the high-profile attendees were the Deputy Governor of Kaduna State Dr Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe, the Director-General of VON Mallam Jibrin Baba Ndace, President of the NIPR Ike Neliaku, President of the African Public Relations Association (APRA), Arik Karani, and Ambassador Dr. Brylyne Chitsunge, a renowned South African based food security expert and CEO of Elpasso Farms who also serves as the keynote speaker for the Nigerian Public Relations Week (NPRW) 2026. A lecture on AI prompt Engineering by Dr Monday Ashibogwu CEO Billsbox Services Limited, added a contemporary dimension to the conversations, reminding delegates that the tools reshaping communication are already relevant to public health advocacy.
When I eventually took my seat on that panel, I found that the experience confirmed something I have long believed about journalism and public discourse: that the most honest, useful thing you can do in a room full of people invested in a problem is to refuse to let the comfortable narrative go unchallenged. Drug abuse in Nigeria will not be meaningfully addressed by moralising at young people. It will be addressed when we have the structural honesty to ask harder questions about the economy we have built, the futures we have withheld, and the systems of care we have consistently failed to fund and more importantly the level of advocacy and awareness we have raised.
That, more than anything, is what I hope the organisers took home from the Kaduna Youth Summit.
Dahiru, head of fact checking and special project at PRNigeria writes via [email protected]
