Nigeria’s renowned media and public relations firm, Image Merchant Promotions Limited (IMPR), has provided cash prizes to its young editors and PR managers after the presentation of their action plans for the year 2021.

The grants were disbursed after a two-day editorial retreat held at the company’s headquarters in Abuja where each participant presented their strategic action plan for the year, to the company’s chief executives.

The Image Merchants Promotion, a multi-award winning communication firm, is the publisher of PRNigeria, Economic Confidential, Emergency Digest, Politics Digest and Tech Digest. It also publishes Spokespersons Digest and Arewa Agenda.

While handing the cheques, Chairman of the Board of Directors, IMPR, Alhaji Sule Yau Sule, stated that he was so happy to see the presentations of the strategic action plans and was overwhelmed to see that the IMPR team, mostly of young people, have a direct focus on where it intends to go, noting that planning and assessment is key to being proactive.

“Strategic communication is the in-thing now and we must all rely on it to achieve a lot of goals, unfortunately, there is not much literature in the field and when I was doing my PhD thesis in the area, I found only for works in the field done by Professor Lai Oso, Professor Umar Pate and two others.”

He hinted that he would soon be coming up with a book on strategic communication to contribute to that field of knowledge.

Here, therefore, urged the IMPR team to make use of available resources and put the grants given into justifiable use towards achieving their action plans for the year.

On his part, Mallam Yusuf Ali, a director at IMPR, commended all the staff including the Editor-in-Chief, Mr. Yushau Shuaib, stating that he was inspired by the presentations from young and fertile minds on the IMPR team which shows that Nigeria has a very robust future ahead, encouraging everyone to sustain the standard.

Lamenting that the media in Nigeria is sliding, Mallam Ali urged all to take their beats seriously and also concentrate on a lot of investigative reports as it does not mean serving the company only but building capacity and shaping the future.

“In the ’80s when we started Journalism, we were almost at 100km/hr. but now we have fallen to even 20km/hr. Journalists are now afraid to do investigative stories rather they prefer to be going for patronizing reports for obvious reason. The competition is no longer there, I will be happy if your generation changes this. We are very ready to hand over the mantle of journalism to the next generation,” he stated.

The high point of the retreat culminated strategic redistribution for roles to various editors across all IMPR titles towards quality and error-free output going forward.

In his closing remarks, Senator Iroegbu, a public affairs analyst, described the founder of IMPR, Yushau Shuaib, as an incredibly supportive man of vision and reservoir of ideas. (PRNigeria)

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