NPRW 2026: Insights from Kaduna Youth Forum on Nigeria’s substance abuse response
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, keeping
- 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, 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 events within a community of practice normally comes with the familiar warmth of recognisable faces and the pleasant obligation of exchanging pleasantries. My boss, Mr. Yushau Shuaib, and I just 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 Mr. Ahmed Balarabe Sa'id cut through the crowd.
"I'm glad you are here. We are going to put you on a panel," the academic said. "You are a very strong voice and need to share it on this platform," he urged. Sa'id, a prominent communication strategist and media professional, handed me over to the event moderators, who accredited me to join the panel alongside Abbigail Sabbah John, a youth advocate and social entrepreneur with experience in youth development and community mobilisation, and Anna Husseini Pai, Executive Director of the Yargote Foundation.
A body of this nature demands insight and perspective grounded enough to enrich both the audience and the organisers, who should ideally translate 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.
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, an instructive debate broke out on the main floor. In his keynote address, Dr. Joseph Ike, Director-General, Kaduna State Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (KADSAMHSA), suggested that advocacy and awareness campaigns have not been sufficiently effective in curbing drug addiction in Nigeria. He advised the government to focus on the root causes of substance abuse—poverty, unemployment, and peer pressure.
The remark drew a response from Mr. Jibrin Baba Ndace, Director-General of Voice of Nigeria (VON), who argued that no policy, programme, or social intervention can thrive 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. Ndace observed that the Kaduna Youth Forum itself was an act of advocacy.
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. The forum, which drew over 200 students from tertiary institutions, was absolutely educational, even as the energy in the venue—the Faculty of Arts theatre—was unmistakable.
What lent the occasion additional resonance was Nigeria's public relations victory at the 2026 Africa SABRE Awards in South Africa, where the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) won Gold in the Crisis and Issues Management category. Its "War Against Drug Abuse" campaign, executed by Image Merchants Promotion Limited (IMPR), was commended for strategic clarity, strong public engagement, and perception management. The judges noted that the initiative demonstrated how evidence-based communication can build public trust while tackling threats like drug trafficking and abuse—the argument DG Ndace made in Kaduna.
Other high-profile attendees were the Deputy Governor, Dr. Hadiza Sabuwa Balarabe; President of the NIPR, Ike Neliaku; President of the African Public Relations Association (APRA), Arik Karani; and Dr. Brylyne Chitsunge, a renowned South Africa-based food security expert and CEO of Elpasso Farms, who is the keynote speaker for the 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 relevant to public health advocacy.
My experience being on the panel confirmed something I 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 only by lecturing young people. It will be addressed when we ask harder questions about the economy we have built, the futures we have withheld, the systems of care we have failed to fund, and the level of advocacy and awareness we have raised.
That, more than anything, is what I hope the organisers as well as the participants took home from the Kaduna Youth Summit.
Dahiru Lawal, an award-winning factchecker, writes from Abuja via mdlawal001@gmail.com
