OYANBO PEACE OWEI

Oyanbo Peace Owei is a member of the governing council of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB); where she represents the Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources. She is also the founder of the She 4 She Initiative (SSI), a foundation deeply rooted in the empowerment of women and the girl child.

She has vast experience in law, strategic planning, corporate governance, community development, stakeholder management, project management, strategic communication, and international development.

Mrs Owei is a graduate of the Rivers State University of Technology (2007). She holds a Bachelor of Law (LLB.) and was called to the Nigerian Bar (BL.) in 2008. In 2010, she received a Master of Laws (LLM.) in Commercial and International Law, from the University of Buckingham, United Kingdom. After which, she returned to Nigeria, to practice law.

This practice was brief, as she was soon appointed the Special Assistant on New Media to the Bayelsa State Governor. Her appointment came at a time when communications, brand management, and publicity via the internet, particularly social and digital media platforms, were viewed as relatively abstract in Nigeria. However, being of a generation viewed as digital natives, Owei was wellequipped and skilled in harnessing these platforms to positively highlight the activities of the then Bayelsa State Government. Her overwhelming success at this job led to her being headhunted by the Presidency in 2012 to create and head the new media unit of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, which was set up to rehabilitate renounced militants in the Niger Delta.

Born 27 May 1982, Owei hails from Brass Local Government Area of Bayelsa State.

Venturing into politics is not for the faint-hearted because of its murky waters. What gave you the courage to take this step and what challenges did you face?

I always say that everybody starts from somewhere. I didn’t intend that I will be an active politician or get involved in any sort of political activity. All I know is that when I was in the University I liked to sit around where serious discussions were being tabled. For anything that had to do with the student union, I was always involved. I was interested in policies that will make the university a better place for us. I was always interested in things that had to do with school leadership. I didn’t always put myself forward for an election but the process itself was interesting for me at the time. I finished university and ventured into Business and it was quite successful because of the kind of discipline I put into the Business. After that, I went in for my master’s at the University of Buckingham and came back immediately after qualifying for the degree and I went to Bayelsa state because it was close to where I lived and grew up which is Port Harcourt.

I went to Bayelsa state to try to see what I could do with my Law degree. It was there I ran into a friend who told me about a stakeholders engagement meeting and it was massive.

Initially, I was confused, about where to start but I took the topic and got online to check discourse areas, and

I was able to come up with some kind of structure which

I wrote down in my way to be able to engage and support that stakeholder’s meeting. I was put in a group by that my friend and worked really hard during that period to make sure my impact was felt. When we were done I presented my communique and engagement analysis to him and told him what we had achieved and he was excited and impressed with me and said “people like you should be in government because I watched you carefully.”

He even checked my Facebook page at that time and saw how I was carrying on and engaging in serious topics about government and governance and leading a huge discourse in which I was able to change the minds of those that had funny thoughts about government. Immediately he recommended me to the then governor of Bayelsa State who read and bought into my ideas and appointed me the first senior special assistant to the government on issues relating to New Media and social networking because at the time, the new media space just started opening up and it was a bit confusing for the government.

They didn’t know how to navigate because there was no proper framework on how that space should carry on. So, I did that with little knowledge, but I learned on the job and I learned quick. We were able to use social media as a tool for transparency, accountability, and good governance. We were able to use that as a media platform to have discussions with the citizenry, checkmate the government and strengthen democracy at the time. It was an interesting job because it was something I had never done before and it was a good stepping stone for me.

But one thing I must say is that it was not an easy one. In governance most times, you don’t have a clear cut framework, especially in Nigeria, when you go, you have to learn hard from mistakes and be able to learn from the experience that you would have gathered, so it wasn’t easy for me, being a young person, a female and the youngest appointee in government at the time. Apart from my 9 to 5 job at that time, I also ran a political association where we had Strong people and influencers on social media with a strong social media presence to be able to help us foster accountability of the government.