The Director of Special Duties at the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Hajia Lami Tumaka has congratulated the Public Relations Consultants Association of Nigeria (PRCAN) for its high-impact Masterclass on Digital PR, which was held in Lagos recently.

Tumaka, a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations and one of the participants at the workshop, is responsible for External Relations and Technical Cooperation at the Director-General’s office in NIMASA. She attended the programme with two of her subordinates.

The NIMASA top shot described the workshop as enriching. “It was an interesting programme with rich course content and highly knowledgeable and professional instructors.”

She commended the participants for being “well behaved.” Tumaka further said: “There was no dull moment as the attendees participated actively in the interactive sessions. I learnt new things, making me a ‘digitally’ complaint public relations personality, among others. Kudos to the organisers, and good one PRCAN! I will definitely be back, insha Allah!”

Facilitators at the 13th edition of PRCAN’s Public Relations Masterclass series were Celestine Achi, a digital PR strategist and initiator of the Nigerian DigitalPR wire service; Monday Michaels Ashibogwu, CEO at The Republic Media Limited; and Martha Okpeke, Account Director at Mediacraft Associates, a frontline PR consultancy.

PRCAN President, John Ehiguese, urged other government and private organisations to emulate NIMASA by tapping into the opportunities provided by the PRCAN Masterclass to update the skill sets of their communications and other core staff members.

He enjoined PRCAN member-firms not to relent in updating their team members in order to meet up with the demands and requirements of today’s increasingly demanding business environment.

The PRCAN Public Relations Masterclass is a capacity development initiative of the association. It was launched in 2008 but began to run on a more regular basis in February 2011. Previous workshops had been on “PR Account Management,” “Crisis Management and Communication,” “Effective Writing in Public Relations”, and “Planning and Managing Strategic Public Relations Campaign,” among others.

In the coming months, the PRCAN Masterclass Series will treat various topics including “Public Relations and Public Affairs,” “Preparing the Agency Leadership”, and “Managing the Public Relations Agency.”

PRCAN’s primary objective is to promote professional reputation management in Nigeria across both the public and private sectors. It is also committed to maintaining professional standards and discipline among members and providing facilities/professional capacity for the public and private sectors to meet their PR consultancy needs.

PRCAN is the consulting arm of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR) established by the NIPR by-law No. 3 of 1993. Membership is exclusively restricted to consulting firms whose key executives must be members of NIPR and registered to practice public relations in Nigeria.