COMRADE ADEYANJU HONOURED AS OUTSTANDING MARITIME PERSONALITY
By Mcanthony Onuoha
The President General of Maritime Workers Union of Nigeria- MWUN, Prince Adewale Adeyanju, has been honoured with Outstanding Maritime Personality Award.
Prince Adeyanju, who is also the Vice President of Nigeria Labour Congress- NLC , received the award from The Prestige Blended Magazine in commemoration of the 8th anniversary of the media outfit.
Presenting the award to Adeyanju, the Publisher of The Prestige Blended Magazine Online and print, Mcanthony Udochukwu Onuoha, noted that the outfit resolved to honour him with Outstanding Maritime Personality Award in recognition of his immense contributions to the maritime industry, his uncommon leadership ingenuity which prompted the reformation of dockworkers and improved general working condition of maritime workers.
Prior to the presentation of the award, The Prestige Blended Magazine had granted an exclusive personality interview to Prince Adeyanju in which he shared his understanding of leadership. In his words, ” leadership is give and take. When you learn from me, l learn from you, that is leadership. It requires humility and simplicity to be a good leader. The idea that makes one a leader is always inspired by the people he/she is working with. Leadership is not for sale, you don’t buy it in the market. When one humbles himself he becomes a leader, if you don’t humble yourself you can’t be a good leader, authoritarian, tyrant, dictator are arrogated to people because of their leadership styles and ideologies. A leader must know how to accommodate his subordinates, he must know how to manage crises, leaders are crises managers and it is God that gives leadership.”
On Dockworkers’ transformation, Prince Adeyanju said, ” what phased out the era of stealing and violence was having subordinates behind me, getting the right people to watch my back, l am a disciplinarian, l don’t tolerate rubbish. Good things those days were not attributed to dockworkers, it was only the bad ones. What helped us as we came on board was training and retraining , we were able to send so many people overseas for training and that was how they got exposed to modern ways of operation, they went and saw what their foreign counterparts are doing, coming back, their mindsets changed and they started to embrace the right ways of doing things. Most of them dropped the habits of stealing, thuggery and giving the union a bad name. They embraced sanity because we were able to reorientate a good number of them, empowered them and encouraged them in many ways.”
” There were series of reorientation programmes right from the leadership down to the last person. Formally, dockworkers were not regarded as good people, they were seen as miscreants”.
This great achievement and a lot of other noble accomplishments recorded by Prince Adewale Adeyanju inspired the decision of the media outfit to accord him the honour.
The honour is in line with the resolution of The Prestige Blended Magazine to occasionally single out for recognition, personalities who have distinguished themselves in leadership, professional careers and businesses, and Prince Adewale Adeyanju’s name is indeed prominently and colourfully written in this prestigious compendium.
