We often assume adulthood comes with an automatic claim to dignity. After years of education, professional growth and personal achievement, we expect institutions to treat adults as reasoning beings capable of dialogue, disagreement and independent judgment. Yet after reading Yushau A. Shuaib’s MNI versus MNIPR in NIPSS: Tackling Institutional Bullying, we found ourselves confronting an unsettling question: Can an institution, in the name of discipline, strip adults of the dignity they have spent decades earning?
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.
