Kazeem Babatunde Ambali Bags NITA Award, Emerges Most Exceptional Project Planning, Cost Control & Digital Optimization Personality of the Year

By Tolulope Oke

When the call was made on stage, the room rose to its feet. After weeks of rigorous screening, panel deliberations and painstaking review of commercial outcomes delivered by candidates drawn from Nigeria and its diaspora, one name stood above the rest. That name is Kazeem Babatunde Ambali. At this year’s Nigerian Information Technology Reporters’ Association (NITA) Awards, he was crowned the “Most Exceptional Project Planning, Cost Control & Digital Optimization Personality of the Year,” an accolade reserved for the single professional whose work has moved the numbers most decisively across the three disciplines that now define enterprise success. It is a prize that confirms what United Kingdom employers, cross-continental project teams and a growing roster of Nigerian technology leaders already know: he is, in his class, in a league of his own.

The NITA honour is reserved for professionals whose delivery work combines uncompromising cost discipline, quantifiable digital outcomes and an unusually mature grasp of project planning at enterprise scale. His credentials back every line of it. He holds a Master of Science in Project Management (Advance Practice) from Teesside University in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom, built on a Bachelor of Science in Estate Management from the globally respected Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria, where he graduated with Second Class Honours (Upper Division). He is a certified Google Project Management Professional and a student member of the United Kingdom’s Association for Project Management, giving him one of the most rounded planning profiles of any Nigerian project leader currently operating in Britain.

The numbers tell the rest of the story. He led the development of a customer engagement mobile application that added £600,000 in fresh revenue against a disciplined £700,000 build cost, while driving a forty per cent leap in customer engagement and a twenty per cent rise in mobile sales. He led a cybersecurity overhaul that halved his organisation’s data breach risk and averted an estimated £1 million in potential damages. And he directed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system overhaul that lifted sales revenue by fifteen per cent and unlocked £1 million in additional annual sales. Three projects. Three decisive commercial wins. Zero failures. And each outcome was delivered on budget, on schedule and to specification, the trifecta every enterprise project sponsor prays for.

At Project Control Pros Limited in the United Kingdom, where he has served in a project control capacity since September 2022, he has pushed project delivery speed up by fifteen per cent, cut per-project costs by twenty per cent, saved £200,000 annually in operational outlays and held a ninety-five per cent on-time completion rate across simultaneous engagements. At the Think Pacific Foundation, where he ran projects remotely, his leadership lifted team productivity by thirty per cent and shrank communication-driven delays by twenty-five per cent. At Smile Marketer Consultant, where he cut his teeth as a Project Support and Coordinator, he reduced project risk exposure by twenty-five per cent and raised budget management efficiency by another twenty-five per cent. His methodological command stretches across Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean Six Sigma, executed through Microsoft Project, Primavera P6 and Asana.

Accepting the award, Kazeem Babatunde Ambali was characteristically direct. “Planning is not paperwork. Cost control is not cheese-paring. Digital optimisation is not a buzzword. They are, together, the difference between organisations that survive this century and those that do not,” he said. “To be named the Most Exceptional Project Planning, Cost Control and Digital Optimization Personality of the Year at the NITA Awards is the proudest professional moment of my life. I accept this honour not for myself, but for every Nigerian who has been told the global stage is too big for them. It is not. We belong there. We win there.”

He went further: “I do not believe in abstract project management. I believe in £600,000 added to a company’s top line. I believe in £1 million in damages never paid because a breach never happened. I believe in £200,000 saved every year without a single job being lost. Those are the numbers that got me this NITA award. Those are the numbers that will get the next generation of Nigerian project professionals theirs. I owe it to them to keep delivering, to keep mentoring and to keep raising the bar.”
Across the boardrooms that have engaged him, the conclusion is the same. Kazeem Babatunde Ambali does not promise. He delivers. With the NITA award now his, Nigeria has a new face of project management excellence, and the world has been put firmly on notice.