The Leader of the Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly, Rt. Hon. Okpolupm Ikpong Ikpong Etteh, born September 19, 1970, is a marketer par excellence, who is influencing and inspiring a generation of leaders within and outside the shores of Akwa Ibom.
I am one of those so influenced and inspired. I have watched, from afar, with keen interest and admiration, the rising profile of this great son of Upenekang. Before I met him, I thought of him as some kind of a towering, even intimidating, intellectual figure.
In 2008, I came closer, by proxy though, to him during a workshop organized by the House of Assembly. I was pleasantly surprised to find him a charming, personable, self-deprecatingly modest person, and a delight to listen to and chat with on a wide array of subjects.
In 2007, I had the privilege of editing a memoir sort of or better, a handbook on the profiles and landmark achievements of the Honourable Members of the third Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly (2003 - 2007), The Third Assembly.
I don’t like memoirs. I particularly don’t like memoirs by executives, because they are usually full of accounts of the wonderful things they did, rather than what actually happened. I especially don’t like memoirs by writers: what can they tell us that they haven’t already said much better in their books? So I approach a memoir by someone who has been an executive with a certain sense of foreboding.
As it happened, I couldn’t put my ultimate best at “The Third Assembly.” It’s an amazingly frank account of an amazingly varied tenure of legislators. As youth leader and student leader, Rt. Hon. Etteh went everywhere with activism and unionism. Idealistic, ethical and people-oriented by nature, he represented those he led with humility and sincerity through the choices he made, and the consequences of those choices.
His leadership style is modest and charming. His achievements are mentioned almost in passing. His passion for being a leader, not merely talking about leadership, comes through. One learns how he encountered and overcame prejudice at a number of points of his career. One sees how the depth and breadth of his personal experiences is the forge from which his leadership strength emerged.
Akwa Ibom State is lucky to have someone like Rt. Hon. Etteh. Akwa Ibom State is even luckier now that he is aspiring to lead the state and steer it to a safe shore.
Rt. Hon. Etteh epitomizes the view of a leader as someone who not only made “people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery,” but actually believes in a vision of leadership in which that is a reality, not just a feeling.
His principled concept of leadership and lifestyle is as far as it is possible to be from the shallow, money-seeking, instrumentalist view of marketing, management and leadership that is current in big business today.
Although Rt. Hon. Etteh is by nature a kind and open person, he does not hesitate to take on sensitive issues and to swim against the tide. A good example is his being the longest serving member of the State House of Assembly and his present aspiration.
As a marketer and manager that he is, Rt. Hon. Etteh’s life reflects Peter Drucker’s view of management as one of the liberal arts. “’Liberal’ because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; ‘art’ because it is practice and application… management will increasingly be the discipline and the practice through and in which the ‘humanities’ will again acquire recognition, impact, and relevance.”
Akwa Ibom State is the model of Nigeria’s booming economy as Rt. Hon. Etteh moves to the Hilltop Mansion in 2015. The challenge for us is to walk and work with him.
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