In the space of a few weeks in August 2026, three major international platforms published original work by the same Nigerian practitioner. The Institute for Public Relations carried an essay on embedding AI ethics inside organisations. PR Daily and PRovoke Media both ran versions of a sharp analysis on how nostalgia and childhood aesthetics are being weaponised in modern crisis communication. The author was Ishola Nasirudeen Ayodele, Dean of The School of Impactful Communication (TSIC) in Lagos.
The placements themselves matter. IPR, PR Daily and PRovoke Media (the former Holmes Report) sit among the most closely watched professional outlets in global public relations. For a practitioner based in Nigeria to appear across all three in rapid succession is unusual. It signals that ideas developed outside the traditional centres of the industry are finding an audience at the highest levels of the profession.
Ayodele’s contributions rest on two related arguments. The first concerns artificial intelligence. In the IPR piece he notes the gap between widespread AI adoption in communications and the far slower development of governance frameworks. Drawing on data from the Global Alliance and others, he points out that while most organisations now permit AI use, only a minority have responsible frameworks in place, and communication teams rarely lead those efforts. His response is a practical model he calls the 3H approach: Head (apply human judgement before prompting), Heart (place ethics ahead of efficiency), and Hand (keep humans in the loop for accountability). The framework is deliberately simple, designed for daily decision-making rather than abstract policy.
What distinguishes the argument is its deliberate grounding in African thought. Ayodele invokes the Akan proverb that “the ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people” and the Ubuntu principle that a person is a person through other persons. These are not decorative citations. He uses them to insist that ethical AI governance must be evaluated by its impact on communities, not merely by technical compliance. The Venice Pledge on responsible AI, co-signed by the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations among others, becomes in his reading a document that can be adapted to local values rather than imposed as a universal template.
The second strand of his recent work examines crisis communication under conditions of symbolic rather than purely kinetic attack. Using the example of Iranian state-affiliated creators who produced highly polished LEGO-style videos depicting military strikes, complete with hip-hop soundtracks and meme-ready editing, Ayodele describes a “second outbreak” of crisis. The first is the familiar sequence of events, statements and fact-checks. The second is perceptual: the quiet rewriting of meaning through aesthetics that lower cognitive resistance because they feel like play or nostalgia. Content moderation systems trained on graphic violence struggle to catch plastic bricks exploding in cartoon fire. The same techniques, he argues, are already available to actors seeking to reframe corporate failures or political controversies.
Again the analysis is anchored in local intellectual resources. A Yoruba proverb — Òwe lẹṣin ọrọ, ọrọ lẹṣin òwe; bi ọrọ ba sonu, òwe ni a fi n wa a (Proverb is the horse of conversation; when the conversation falters, it is the horse that carries it forward) — becomes a way of explaining why story and image now travel further than conventional corporate messaging. Ayodele has developed this line of thinking under the broader heading of Perceptology, which he describes as the discipline of perception surveillance. The practical recommendations that follow are direct: treat narrative like a pathogen, compete on emotion as well as fact, and map audiences’ emotional landscapes continuously rather than only after a crisis breaks.
These two bodies of work sit within a longer pattern. Ayodele is the author of PR Case Studies: Mastering the Trade, volume 1, 2 & 3 that have been adopted as curriculum material in Nigerian institutions. He founded and leads TSIC, an online platform that has grown into one of the larger regular assemblies of PR practitioners and scholars on the continent. He has received the LaPRIGA PR Influencer of the Year award, the PR Scholar/Author of the Year recognition, and special presidential acknowledgement from then-President Muhammadu Buhari for contributions to the field. He has also served on the jury panels of major Nigerian PR awards.
What the 2026 publications demonstrate is not simply personal visibility. They show that frameworks developed in Africa — mixing practical models with indigenous ethical resources — can travel into the same conversations that shape practice in Europe and North America. For an industry that still often treats African communication as a site for adaptation rather than origination, the sequence of placements offers a quiet corrective.
The significance for Nigerian public relations is straightforward. Soft power in the profession is measured less by declarations than by the willingness of leading platforms to publish and engage with local thinking. When those platforms carry arguments that treat African philosophical traditions as resources for contemporary problems of AI governance and perceptual crisis, the terms of the conversation shift. Ayodele’s recent work is one data point in that shift. It suggests that the next phase of the industry’s globalisation may involve more traffic in the opposite direction: ideas moving from Africa outward, rather than only the reverse.
Akintunde is a thought leader, PR consultant, strategic thinker, and online newspaper publisher.
