There is a specific kind of validation that academia confers and another that the world confers. The academy signals acceptance through citation, peer review, and the slow machinery of scholarly publication. The world signals it differently — through use. When a scholar picks up your framework not merely to interrogate it, but to build with it, something important has shifted. That is not endorsement. That is adoption.
That is what happened when Dr. Omoniyi Ibietan — Secretary General of the African Public Relations Association (APRA) and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR)—reached for The Insecurity Triad to anchor the theoretical foundations of his paper on crisis communication in the Agatu conflict. He did not cite it as a curiosity. More importantly for this discourse, Ibietan is a member of doctoral faculty at Rome Business School’s DBA programme.
He used it as a load-bearing wall.
His words, addressed to Premium Times editorial page editor Ololade Bamidele, are worth sitting with: the framework took him back to Mbembe, offered fresh insight into, and — and then did something rarer. It shaped what he was about to write. “So compelling was it,” Ibietan noted, “that it shaped my theoretical framing for a new paper I just submitted.”
Ibietan’s message to Bamidele was in response to last week’s edition of The Sunday Stew entiteld: ‘The Insecurity Triad: Azikiwe, Awolowo, and Chinweizu — Nigeria’s Elite Class of Framework Builders’.
Dr Ibietan’s words: “Thank you Ololade Bamidele. Please tell Dr. Amuchie to keep
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