Idy Enang: Who will tame the bull in NIMN China’s Shop?
When an awkward and a laborious animal runs amok in a marketplace, it plays havoc with delicate items. Same goes for a ponderous and unthinking personality who recklessly approaches a delicate issue and creates a total mess out of it.
English expressions usually have their origins in real life situations. The phrase, a bull in a china shop’ is believed to have its origin in Europe when cattle were brought to the market in London. The beasts would stray into nearby china shops and break all the fragile plates, bowls, and tea cups in a million pieces. So today, the phrase, a bull in a China Shop describes a clumsy person who, on purpose or by accident, always ends up knocking things over or saying the wrong thing at the wrong occasion, even when they don’t mean to.
How else would one describe our Idy Enang, the President/ Chairman in Council of the National Institute of Marketing of Nigeria (NIMN), who mounted the platform at the ongoing National Advertising Conference 2023 in Abuja, orated into the microphone, before a distinguished audience, a matter that he alone has recklessly blown out of proportion.
Mr. Enang, at the event put together by the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON), began, in his usual out of place manner of dealing too roughly with a delicate issue, by accusing MARKETING EDGE of refusing to answer what he described as “simple questions”. By simple questions Mr. Enang was publicly and ridiculously telling Nigerians that a registered media organization such as MARKETING EDGE, a member of the Fourth Estate of the realm with constitutional rights, is answerable to him on strictly internal management matters and editorial policy decisions.
For the records, the Nigerian marketing and advertising community should take note once again that MARKETING EDGE as a reputable firm has officially and formally answered the so-called questions raised by NIMN under the infantile and preposterous leadership of Mr. Enang, both in a letter and in the national newspapers through its legal advisers. In fact, it’s Mr. Enang’s NIMN, which has refused to answer several posers put forward by MARKETING EDGE and many well meaning industry professionals.
To further demonstrate his incoherent speech to such a fine audience, Mr. Enang rambled into the matter of building an egalitarian society, being a reformer and equating such with MARKETING EDGE not being able to prove to him the criteria and processes through which it arrived at Top 10 Marketing Professionals and Top 10 Digital Marketing Professionals rating on its online platform. He prattled on about change and the Nigerian state.
Of course, the earnest hope of millions of Nigerians is for the country to change for better through contemporary leadership driven by global best practices, technological innovation and a hands-on creative approach devoid of red tape and unscrupulous hegemony. Definitely not the sort of change Idy vacuously mouthed on that prestigious NAC 2023 podium.
Until Idy stops rushing into the IMC industry issues without thinking about them clearly, he will continue to act like a bull in a china shop and create more damages for himself, his poor advisers and the institute. They will continue to leave a big mess in their wake.
This is how Idy consciously or inadvertently put it in his high school rambunctious speech, “I have finished my course, my job is to teach”, whatever that means. We hope that this self-appointed pedagogical task of his does not bring a little too much mayhem to NIMN. Can someone tell Idy that he is handling the issue so badly and adding fuel to the fire?
Change will remain a mirage in Nigeria with the brand of clumsy leadership Mr. Enang has brought to NIMN, an institute that Mr. John Ajayi along side other committed senior Fellows spent a lot of their precious time in the trenches to put in order throughout its crisis years.
Suffice it to say that Mr. Enang and his caravan of anachronistic reformers wouldn’t have had an institute to ride a roughshod on and even cannibalize with the same pointless claims he is making without the journalistic doggedness of Mr. John Ajayi, a long standing Fellow of the institute who worked tirelessly with others to unify and rebuild the institute from the ashes of disunity and self-inflicted ruination.
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