Udu Yakubu’s Profile

A biographer, corporate historian, and scholarly publisher, Udu Yakubu started his working career as a journalist at The Guardian newspaper, and later practised at The News/Tempo magazines in the heyday of the pro-democracy movement in Nigeria in the 1990s. Subsequently, he had a university career that spanned over fifteen years of research, teaching, publishing, and management responsibilities at the Olabisi Onabanjo University and the University of Lagos, two institutions from where he earned his degrees in English. He was a visiting fellow at the School of English, University of Leeds, a laureate of the Council for the Development of Economic and Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Dakar, and a two-time heritage management consultant to the Institute of International Education (IIE), New York, among others. From 1998 to 2011, he served as Executive Director (part-time) at the African Cultural Institute, Lagos, and facilitated major national and international conferences, publications and projects.

He founded the Journal of Cultural Studies in 1999, and served as its substantive scholarly editor till 2010. The journal was globally referenced, abstracted and indexed by several leading academic indexing organizations including the Modern Language Association (MLA), Cambridge Sociological Abstracts (CSA), the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS), and the African Book Publishing Record (ABPR). He also served for four years as scholarly editor of Gege: Ogun Studies in English. He was Secretary to the Steering Committee that facilitated the establishment of the Association of African Scholarly Editors (AASE) based in Kampala, Uganda in 2004. He distinguished himself as a scholarly editor through a direct active support of the career development of over three hundred university professors in Africa, Europe and North America. He is himself author of numerous scholarly papers, and over a dozen books and biographies.

Udu currently manages May Publishing Limited, a strategic research and publishing firm, which he founded. He has worked with and directed several heritage management projects with various topflight public and corporate organisations in Nigeria. He is a Certified Management Consultant and a Fellow of the Nigerian Institute of Management Consultants. He is also a two-time recipient of the “October 1st Award” of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Nigeria.

An Old Boy of Kuramo College, Victoria Island and King’s College, Lagos, he was pioneer National President of the Kuramo College Old Students’ Association. He is an ardent player of tennis, and an active member of the Mainland Tennis Club, Lagos. At the core of his career in academia, the media, and business are the values of visionary enterprise and strategic management, marked by integrity, hard work, professionalism, liberal imagination, creative and critical thinking, and service delivery.  He is married to Dr. Anthonia M. Yakubu, an Associate Professor of English at the National Open University of Nigeria, and they are blessed with three sons.