Our encounter with the memoir began at a special event where Shuaib — Managing Director of Image Merchants Promotion Ltd (IMPR) and founder of the PRNigeria Young Communication Fellowship — challenged young attendees to read and review the book within a week. We accepted the challenge, and we are glad we did.
Shuaib writes from a vantage point few can claim. With more than three decades of experience in crisis communication and public relations, he has spent a career studying how power behaves — how it persuades, how it intimidates, and how it sometimes chooses coercion over leadership. His professional history includes confrontations with powerful ministers such as Dr Ngozi Okonjo‑Iweala and Mr Lai Mohammed, and even institutions like the Federal Civil Service and Access Bank, some of which escalated into litigation. That background gives the memoir its sharpness and its credibility.
The book is not a rant. It is not the lament of an aggrieved man seeking sympathy. It reads instead like a meticulously assembled case file — written by someone who has spent his life advising others on how to navigate institutional crises, and who now turns that same discipline inward to examine his own experience.
At first glance, the title may seem like a bureaucratic quarrel between acronyms. But the memoir is not about acronyms. It is about what happens when an institution designed to nurture excellence begins to treat accomplished adults like schoolchildren summoned to a headmaster’s office.
One incident in the book captures this dynamic with almost painful simplicity. A participant casually stood with one hand in his pocket. A directing staff member barked, “Pocketing!” The participant, confused, quietly removed his hand. His offence was not misconduct or disrespect. It was simply the way he was standing.
On its own, the moment seems trivial. But placed alongside the many others Shuaib documents, it becomes part of a troubling pattern. Participants were reportedly instructed not to use professional titles or post‑nominal letters that reflected years of hard work. Presentation styles were tightly controlled, even when alternative approaches were professionally sound. Responses to official queries had to be rewritten in a prescribed NIPSS style. Shuaib recalls reading apology letters that “seemed out of character for accomplished professors, more like school children begging for forgiveness.” That line lingers because it captures the emotional cost of surrendering one’s professional identity to satisfy an institutional expectation.
Another episode is even more jarring: the public announcement of participants summoned before a disciplinary panel. Their names were read aloud during plenary sessions. For Shuaib, the issue was not the panel itself but the public nature of the summons — an act that felt less like accountability and more like humiliation.
What makes these accounts striking is the calibre of people involved. As Shuaib notes, participants in NIPSS SEC 47 included individuals who had commanded military formations, led national institutions, drafted policies and shaped public discourse. Yet, according to him, they were often addressed as though all those years of experience evaporated the moment they arrived at NIPSS.
The more we read, the more the environment resembled our secondary school days. Assemblies where students stood with military precision. Prefects whose authority sometimes exceeded their responsibilities. Public reprimands. Obedience valued above understanding. Many of those practices were meant to instill discipline, and often they did. But they also created a culture where questioning was interpreted as disrespect.
Shuaib’s memoir suggests that similar patterns may exist in some Nigerian institutions — where seniority is mistaken for entitlement, and hierarchy becomes a license to diminish others. His narrative pushes back against that assumption, insisting that professionalism should mean the opposite: that hierarchy does not suspend the basic dignity owed to another adult.
At several points, participants reportedly accepted treatment they considered unfair simply because they wanted to complete the programme. One participant advised, “If you cannot beat them, do whatever they ask you to do so that you can have peace and the MNI badge.” Shuaib’s response — “Is MNI badge akin to joining a cult?” — is a piercing question. It suggests that survival gradually became more important than honest engagement.
To be fair, institutions like NIPSS exist to develop leaders. High standards, discipline and accountability are necessary. The real question is not whether discipline should exist, but how it is exercised. There is a profound difference between correcting people and diminishing them.
Adults do not stop being adults simply because they enter a training institution. Respect should not disappear because someone wears a participant’s tag instead of an official title. Institutions that train leaders should model the leadership values they hope participants will carry into society: fairness, dialogue, proportionality and respect.
One sentence from the book stayed with us long after we finished reading it: “This was institutionalised bullying dressed up as discipline.” Whether readers fully agree or not, the statement forces a necessary reflection. Discipline loses its moral authority when it depends more on fear than respect.
What keeps the memoir from descending into bitterness is its storytelling. Shuaib writes with vivid detail but resists melodrama. He allows the events — suspension, silence, nomination, resistance — to speak for themselves. A lesser writer might have used the material to settle scores. Shuaib uses it to make an argument: that truth and resilience can outlast even the most entrenched systems of power, provided one refuses to let silence become permanent.
There is also courage in the book’s timing and framing. Shuaib does not publish this as a whispered grievance. He publishes it as a named, public account, attaching his reputation to every page. That alone gives the memoir a credibility anonymous complaints rarely enjoy.
MNI versus MNIPR in NIPSS deserves attention beyond the institution at its centre. It is a case study in how institutional bullying operates in Nigerian professional life — through intimidation disguised as discipline, through hierarchy mistaken for superiority, and through the expectation that those who are wronged will remain silent.
Its power lies in its specificity and restraint: a professional’s account of being treated like a schoolboy inside an institution built to produce Nigeria’s finest, and his refusal to accept that treatment as normal. For anyone interested in institutional accountability, professional dignity or simply a compelling story of resilience under pressure, this memoir is worth reading.
Abashi Rahab and Ibrahim Happiness are with the Department of Strategic Communication, Yakubu Gowon University, Abuja. Email: [email protected], [email protected]
