According to the Premium Times, President Muhammadu Buhari has appointed journalist Tolu Ogunlesi as his Special Assistant on New Media.
Mr. Ogunlesi has gone through security screening and his appointment will reportedly be announced in the coming days. He is known as one of Nigeria’s most active Twitter users, and was highly critical of the past administration going into the 2015 general elections.
Mr. Ogunlesi will manage the Buhari administration’s social media activity, a role played by Reno Omokiri for the former administration under Goodluck Jonathan.
Before this appointment, Mr. Ogunlesi was a freelance writer, contributing articles to various publications, most of them abroad. He also wrote opinion articles in many Nigerian newspapers, including SaharaReporters.
Mr. Ogunlesi was originally trained as a pharmacist and worked as Features Editor for the defunct 234NEXT newspapers. In 2009 he was awarded the Arts and Culture prize in the annual CNN Multichoice African Journalism Awards. He won the CNN award again in 2013 in another category.
Mr. Ogunlesi tweets via @toluogunlesi and has 143,000 followers.