Now recognised among Nigeria’s Top 50 Public Relations Professionals in the prestigious GLG Communications Power List 2025, in partnership with The Guardian Newspaper, and previously honoured in Techeconomy’s IWD2025: 100 Women Shaping the Future, Umar’s rising profile is no accident, it is the result of a career defined by vision, discipline, and excellence.

As the Director of Corporate Communications and External Relations at the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Hadiza Umar has emerged as a critical voice in shaping how Nigeria’s digital transformation story is told, not just to citizens, but to the world.

A Strategic Storyteller in a Digital Era

In a world increasingly influenced by perception, misinformation, and digital velocity, effective communication is more than a PR tool, it’s national infrastructure.

Hadiza Umar understands this deeply. She has strategically positioned NITDA as not just a government agency, but a policy shaper, innovation driver, and development catalyst.

Through her leadership, NITDA’s communications strategy has evolved into a coherent, multi-stakeholder engagement system that resonates with Nigeria’s youth, private sector, development partners, and the international community. She has successfully led campaigns that demystify technology policies, promote data protection, digital skills, and indigenous tech innovation — amplifying both NITDA’s mandate and Nigeria’s global voice.

The Power List Recognition: A Career Milestone

Her inclusion in the GLG Top 50 PR Power List 2025 places her alongside Nigeria’s most accomplished communicators, professionals shaping public opinion, building brands, and steering national narratives.

This recognition underscores her role in positioning public institutions as modern, responsive, and aligned with Nigeria’s digital aspirations.

“She embodies what it means to be a communications leader in today’s Nigeria,” noted GLG’s editorial team. “She doesn’t just represent a government agency; she represents a movement towards greater transparency, digital inclusion, and public accountability.”

A Trailblazer Among Women in Tech and Policy

Earlier in the year, Hadiza was also listed among Techeconomy’s “100 Women Shaping the Future”, a powerful compilation of women leaders redefining the tech and innovation landscape in Africa. Her dual recognitions in both public relations and technology spheres reflect a unique ability to bridge sectors, a rare and valuable asset in the modern communications space.

Being one of the few women leading communications at the highest level of Nigeria’s digital governance structure, she continues to serve as a role model for young women aspiring to careers in ICT, media, and policy.

Leadership Rooted in Purpose

What makes Hadiza Umar stand out is not just her professionalism, but her deep-rooted belief in the power of communication to enable change. Whether she’s managing a crisis, promoting a national initiative like the Nigeria Data Protection Act, or guiding NITDA’s media engagements, she does so with calm confidence and strategic foresight.

Beyond her role at NITDA, she is actively involved in inter-agency coordination, public sector reform discussions, and capacity development initiatives, especially around women’s leadership in ICT and governance.

Looking Ahead: A New Generation of Public Communicators

Hadiza’s influence signals a broader shift in Nigeria’s public communication landscape, one that prioritises engagement over propaganda, clarity over obfuscation, and digital reach over bureaucracy. She represents the new face of strategic communication in government, where storytelling, technology, and trust converge.

As she continues to elevate public discourse and connect citizens with policies that matter, Hadiza Umar is not just managing communications. She is reshaping national perception and lighting a path for the next generation of communicators.

In a time when trust in institutions is fragile and attention spans fleeting, professionals like Hadiza Umar remind us that effective communication remains a cornerstone of progress. And for Nigeria’s digital future, hers is a voice we’ll be hearing, and learning from, for years to come.

This came during a fireside chat with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg at the LlamaCon conference on Tuesday. For those of us watching, it was a new phase of software development, where humans and machines work side by side, not in theory, but in the process of producing code.

This is beyond speeding things up. It’s about what’s being built, who’s building it, and how much control engineers still have. 

Nadella pointed out that Python has been more responsive to machine-written code, while C++ — a language notorious for its strictness — is trailing. That tells us something important: the technology isn’t universal, and the shift isn’t clean.

Interestingly, when Nadella turned the same question back to Zuckerberg — how much of Meta’s code is machine-generated — Zuck didn’t offer numbers. “I don’t know,” he admitted, though he did confirm that Meta is investing heavily in automated development and expects machines to handle “half of our coding work” before long. The silence on current figures wasn’t lost on anyone.

Meanwhile, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, on an earnings call last week, claimed more than 30% of Google’s code is now machine-generated. But here’s the catch: no one seems quite sure what counts as “generated.” Are we talking about boilerplate scripts suggested by autocomplete tools or fully functional modules? Pichai didn’t say, and Nadella didn’t clarify either. That makes it hard to compare — and easy to overhype.

Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott added another layer of boldness to the mix. “I expect 95% of all code to be machine-generated by 2030,” he said recently. It’s a huge number. But these projections gloss over a real tension developers feel: where does assistance end and overreliance begin?

The tools themselves — those AI-driven co-pilots, reviewers, and debuggers — are becoming essential. At Microsoft, Nadella says they’re now baked into the workflow, not just for writing code, but for catching bugs and managing quality. It’s not about coding faster. It’s about trusting what the system builds — and knowing what to do when it breaks.

But even with all this automation, we’re not seeing uniform results. Some languages benefit more than others. Some teams resist the change entirely. And while executives trade stats and predictions, there’s still little clarity on what “AI-generated” actually means in practice.

The bottom line? We’re not in a world where machines are just helping. They’re now co-authors of the digital infrastructure that powers everything — and not everyone is ready for that level of partnership.