By Joy Odor, Abuja
Nigeria’s communication industry long dismissed as a backroom function erupted into the national spotlight this week after a blistering forum in Abuja exposed what experts now call the country’s most expensive invisible crisis: the widening gap between knowledge and action.
At KM & COMM Village Media Insight, what was expected to be a quiet creative gathering detonated into a full-scale indictment of the nation’s communication culture.
Young innovators, corporate players, development strategists and industry veterans spent hours dissecting a problem they said has crippled organisations, inflamed community conflicts and drained the economy: Nigeria hears a lot, speaks a lot but understands very little.
“Nigeria doesn’t have a knowledge problem. Nigeria has a translation problem.”
That declaration, delivered sharply by Tunji Idowu, a seasoned investment and strategy expert, set the tone for a night that rapidly transformed from conversation to confrontation.
Idowu, whose career spans government bureaucracy, global oil and gas, and private-sector consulting, said the nation is drowning in data yet starving for meaning.
“People hear something entirely different from what you think you said,” he warned. “And organisations pay in conflict, wasted resources and bad decisions.”
He described Nigeria where analytics is weak, communication is fragmented, and decision-making is often detached from reality, a combination he called “a perfect recipe for institutional blindness.”
The conveners call it Nigeria’s “silent emergency”
For Comrade Adeshola Komolefe, founder of KM & COMM Village Media Insight and Converner of the meeting earlier in her address, the crisis is deeper and older than most Nigerians realise.
She said the country’s biggest leadership failures often begin with the smallest misunderstandings messages that never land, instructions that never translate, strategies that never reach the people meant to execute them.
“We searched for a space big enough for creativity but small enough for truth,” Komolefe said. “Because this crisis has festered for too long. Nigeria is paying the price for communication we refuse to fix.”
Komolefe did not mince words about the real-world cost.
In the corporate boardrooms and host communities he has worked in for decades, a single misunderstanding has shut down multi-billion-naira operations, escalated minor disagreements into full-blown crises, and driven companies out of regions they once dominated.
The cure, she said, came only when communicators stopped being firefighters and began operating as architects of alignment.
“When we moved communication to the planning table not the crisis table conflicts dropped, staff stayed longer, communities earned more, and organisations saved millions,” she said. “For 20 years, it has worked. Organisations don’t fail for lack of knowledge; they fail for lack of translation.”
Then came the shockwave story of the night from the theatre stage to global strategy rooms
If Idowu delivered the warning, Anike Alli-Hakeem delivered the war cry.
The communications officer, who began her career as a stage actor, electrified the room with a vivid account of how she became a one-woman PR engine for a Nigerian theatre troupe at the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
No budget.
No comms officer.
No press strategy.
Just grit, improvisation and guerrilla tactics.
She infiltrated diaspora groups online, cold-emailed global promoters, and turned five people into an empty Edinburgh theatre one of them a major critic into a global breakthrough.
“That one person filled our seats for the rest of the festival,” she said. “And by Day 29, we won a Fringe Award.”
Her story underscored the central thesis of the night: communication is no longer about information; it is about movement. Impact. Behaviour. Change.
Throughout the evening, speakers highlighted the suffocating struggle of creative entrepreneurs searching for spaces to innovate, the inability of institutions to convert insights into action, and the rising global pressure on organisations to communicate with precision, not noise.
The audience agreed on one truth:
Nigeria’s problem is not ideas. It is a translation.
By the close of the forum, the room had shifted from analysis to determination.
The message was clear, Nigeria needs communicators who are:
Translators of complexity
Orchestrators of meaning
Engineers of action
Architects of alignment
Not broadcasters.
Not press-release machines.
Not crisis responders.
“Imagine organisations where knowledge doesn’t sit in folders,” one strategist said. “But flows through people, generating clarity, cohesion and impact.”
The applause that ended the night was not polite, it was revolutionary
It was the sound of a room ready to rewrite the future of communication in Nigeria.
A sound that said the era of noise is ending.
And the era of meaning, sharp, strategic, actionable meaning, is finally beginning.
