The former Minister of Sports, Bolaji Abdullahi, was picked as the new spokesperson of Nigeria’s governing All Progressives Congress, APC.
Mr. Abdullahi succeeds Lai Mohammed who was appointed Minister of Information by President Muhammadu Buhari.
Both are from Kwara State.
Mr. Abdullahi was nominated at a meeting of the North Central zone of the APC, which held at Chelsea Hotel, Abuja.
Abdullahi started his working career as a volunteer and part-time worker in civil society organizations and international agencies before joining ThisDay newspapers as a reporter in 1997.
In his first year as a journalist, he won a nomination for the Nigerian Media Merit Award for the Best Newspaper Feature of the Year. In 1998, he joined the Africa Leadership Forum, a civil society organization based in Ota, Ogun State as a Publications Officer, and later a Programme Officer. He returned to ThisDay in 2000 as the Deputy Editor of ThisDay on Sunday, and become the Deputy Editor of ThisDay a year later. However, it was for his weekly column, Grains of Wit that he made his mark.
In 2001, he won the British Council Chevening Scholarship to study for a postgraduate programme in Governance and Development at the prestigious Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom where in 2002; he bagged a Masters Degree with Distinction.
In April 2007 he was appointed as the Commissioner of Education, Science and Technology, a position he held until May 2011. His tenure as Commissioner recorded key achievements which had great impact on the educational system in Kwara State such as the comprehensive educational reforms and significant State-wide improvement in educational standards. Also to his credit, was the significant rise in the standard and quality of teaching throughout the State.
