Tech Personality of the Week: Reuben Muoka

Rueben Muoka is the Director, Public Affairs, Nigeria Communications Commission.

He is consummate communications and Public Relations professional who has brought forthrightness, honesty and timeliness to NCC’s dynamic regulatory environment.

He has also brought to bear his years of expertise in the media space to help to spread trust about the NCC and its objectives to ensure that the telecommunication consumer continues to be treated with required courtesy and respect and gets access to reliable and premium information and service.

Reuben Muoka has a huge experienced in both specialized and traditional journalism, public relations, integrated marketing communications (IMC), corporate communication and people management, to bear on the Commission’s vision to expand the frontiers of its public goodwill and the impact of its reputational assets.

A former Deputy Communications Editor of the Vanguard Newspapers, former Deputy General Manager at MTS First Wireless (Nigeria’s first mobile telephone operator).

Muoka joined the NCC in 2007 as a Principal Manager, and was deployed to the Public Affairs Department where he headed the Media and Public Relations Unit. He later rose from the rank of Principal Manager to the position of an Assistant Director in 2010, and by 2015, as a Deputy Director, appointed to head the re-engineered Public Relations Unit of PAD. In 2017, he was redeployed to the Policy, Competition and Economic Analysis Department to head the Economic Analysis unit of department.

Until his appointment as Director Public Affairs, he was appointed to head the Special Duties Department at the NCC, which superintends the International Relations Unit; Emergency Communication Centres Unit; the Public Private Partnership Unit; and the Security Services Unit of the Commission.

Muoka has a degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos, specialising in Public Relations and Advertising, where he had earlier successfully completed a Postgraduate Diploma (PGD) in the same field of Mass Communication.

As a mark of his distinctive journalism career, Muoka received a fellowship of the Egyptian Embassy in Nigeria to undertake a Pan-African training and tour of Egypt in 1999, leading to an award of a continental Diploma Certificate in Journalism at the instance of the Egyptian Ministry of Information, and the African Journalists Union (AJU) in Cairo, Egypt.

The focused, innovative and illuminating coverage and analysis of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the pre and immediate post liberalisation period of telecom industry in Nigeria is credited to the insights of visionary journalists like Muoka, whose pioneering initiative led to the establishment and institutionalisation of the Hi-Tech Desk in Vanguard Newspapers in late 1990s.

As the Chairman of the League of Communications Correspondents (LECCO), Muoka led his colleagues to give voice and focus to the advocacy for the liberalisation and deregulation of the telecom industry in Nigeria in the 1990s.

During his active days in journalism at Vanguard Newspapers, Muoka served concurrently as Africa’s contributing editor to the London-based CommunicationsWeek for four years beginning from 1998, during which he undertook copious reportage of the African telecom landscape. The London-based magazine shared Muoka’s work to an enthusiastic global audience in a rare showcase of Africa’s promise as a flourishing point for the emergent converging telecommunications industry.

Between 1995 and 2001, Muoka leveraged his expertise to provide part-time public relations consultancy to notable companies and institutions in the telecommunications industry, including the Nigerian Mobile Communications Limited, Abuja; Multi-links Telecommunications Limited, Lagos; Satellite Telecommunications Limited, Lagos; Pulse Marketing Communications Ltd, Lagos; and the Nigerian Communications Commission, Abuja, years before he joined the Commission as a staff.

Reuben Ejike Muoka is a member of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ); a full member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (mnipr); and an associate member of the Registered Practitioners of Advertising (arpa), regulated by the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON).