My profile

I currently work as project officer and Gender Focal Person with the Environmental Rights/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), Nigeria’s most visible environmental NGO. I am the presenter of ERA/FoEN’s tobacco control media initiative Tobacco & You, a weekly radio show.

My interest in tobacco control issues stems from the current rise in the use of tobacco in developing countries (with attended health catastrophe), a contrast to the trends in the developed world where access to information, a barrage of anti-tobacco control campaigns and government policies are literally sending the tobacco multinationals packing.

The Third World with its lack of adequate information and lose legislations has since come under intense marketing campaign by the messengers of death.

In light of this, it is my belief that, utilizing ‘the tripartite approach’ of the media (print, electronic and internet) is one of the most successful means with which the tobacco control community can obtain maximum results; keeping tobacco off especially under aged youths, reducing tobacco use generally, thus reducing tobacco-related mortality. Besides the radio show, my other tobacco-related activities include setting up a youth tobacco-free club in a rural setting in Nigeria where smoking is rampant, and writing for Nigerian papers on tobacco control issues (www.tobacco.org/news/267307.html, www.guardiannewsngr.com/.../indexn2_html).   Until I joined ERA in 2007, I worked as a journalist for Nigerian publications including the influential TELL and NEWSWATCH Magazines. I was also a recipient of numerous professional fellowships including the Nigeria Media Merit Award, the Diamond Award for Media Excellence, the American Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship (AFPF) and the Knight Public Health Journalism Fellowships.

The AFPF saw me reporting at the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado for five months in 2006 and undergoing several journalism trainings in the USA and Canada.

I obtained a degree in English and Literary Studies from the University of Calabar in 1999. My passion for writing budded early in life for while in school, I worked wrote for various campus publications and served as literary editor of Quill, my departmental magazine, deputy editor of Malabor Watch, a publication of the Student Union Government of my university and served as pioneer chairperson of the university branch of the National Association of Campus Women Journalists (NACWOJ).

During the compulsory National Youth Service (NYSC), I served as press club coordinator and production editor of the maiden edition of the Regalite magazine of Regal College, Sagamu, Ogun State, part of whose activities earned me the NYSC’s “State Honours Award’.