Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Every great development was the outcome of a dream. These three words, “Yes I (We) Can”, is a tonic that performs magic. It is one of the greatest and effective three word-sentence that humanity has ever known. It is correlative to dreaming. Many years ago, Martin Luther King Jr., had a dream and most of us are familiar with his stirring “I have a dream” words, which became the name for the ten-minute speech made on August 28, 1963, calling for racial equality and an end to discrimination in America.
Probably, the reason that these words still resonate loudly many years after it was first spoken is because we all have dreams – dreams for our own lives, dreams for our children, dreams for our community, dreams for the larger society, and dreams for the future – all kinds of dreams. Some of the dreams we secretly hold we may reason away and set aside as unrealistic notions. But what if our dreams could come true? The world, certainly, will be a better place.
In 1903, there was an article in the New York Times; two physics professors had explain why airplanes could not possibly fly. Three months after the article was published, the Wright brothers split the air at Kitty Hawk. The value of that development still stuns humanity. That was the power of a dream. In the early 1970s, Dr. Judah Folkman proposed an idea in cancer research that did not fit what scientists “knew” to be true, that tumors did not generate new blood vessels to “feed” themselves and grow. He was convinced that they did. But colleagues kept telling him, “You are studying dirt,” meaning his project was futile science. Folkman disregarded the insults of the research community. For two decades, he met disinterest or hostility as he pursued his work in angiogenesis, the study of the growth of new blood vessels.
At one research convention, half the audience walked out. “He is only a surgeon,” he heard someone say. But he always believed that his work might help stop the growth of tumors, and might find ways to grow blood vessels where they were needed – like around clogged arteries in the heart. Folkman and his colleagues discovered the first angiogenesis inhibitors in the 1980s. Today more than 100,000 cancer patients are benefitting from the research he pioneered. His work is now recognized as being on the forefront in the fight to cure cancer.
Though on different fields, Bassey Etienam’s senate ambition shares a great deal of similarities with Folksman’s earlier attempts at a breakthrough for the sake of humanity, drawing a thin line between persistence and obstinacy. And the difference between persistence and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will and the other from a strong won’t. It is a dream he has nurtured and lived for over the years, not to become a senator for personal satisfaction but to usher in a new era of representation at a higher level. With his thoroughly successful membership of the state parliament, Etienam surprisingly stunned his followers and admirers when he chose not to settle for the “easier” decision of running for a second term as Urue Offong/Oruko representative. For “passing observers,” this decision is too daring and spontaneous. But to multitude of his followers of the lawmaker, it was the hatching of a dream that was conceived years ago and so not unexpected. He is a leader who aims higher and breaks forth from constricted space with a sole purpose of serving humanity.
At no time under this wobbled and wrangled democracy in Akwa Ibom State has the dialectics on leadership been intensely interesting and more torturing than this distressing moment. It is difficult not to accept the “theory” that lodged in the DNA of an average Nigerian politician is the proclivity for deception and greed. But Etienam, whose life has become simplified and focused on one point – service to people, offers a comforting choice. He has retained the common courtesy to keep up a decent show of friendship with everyone he knew before his social and political elevation, and has been a good friend to people who are not so fortunate in life. Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared, but men of character are trusted. This perhaps explains why he operates on a code of ethics that is far superior to known standard in politics. He remains the first loyalty to the electors of Urue Offong/Oruko three years after as member of parliament.
Not one to thread the popular path of cheap ovation, the man himself has over the time maintained that the way forward in political representation is for people to embrace new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed, where enduring approaches need to change and where the future that is collectively influenced is based on mutual respect, mutual resolve, and mutual responsibility. He will continue to search for the best answers and not the familiar ones because they offer the path of least resistance and Eket Senatorial District would attain a new height; For “firmness of purpose”, according to Chesterfield, “is one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies”.
Etienam’s ambition is anchored on the foundation of equality of opportunity and it is a foundation he does not intend to bring down. It seeks to achieve changes and outcomes that are generally desired. He desires to be a pathfinder so that he can accelerate the changes needed to improve outcomes for future generations. The world belongs to the courageous. It takes courage to realize a dream that is not in existence today. Christopher Reeve, opines, “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon seem inevitable”.
T.E. Lawrence captures it vividly that “all men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible”. Etienam fits in squarely in the latter category. He dreams that Eket Senatorial District can do better at the senate and yes it can. His wide acceptance by the people is indicative of his street credibility and scaling the hurdle is only a matter of time.
Otobong Sampson is Head consultant, O-al-Kachi Media and PR (08062511412).
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