The first week of January, witnessed an august celebration of Sir Steve Omojafor, executive chairman of STB-McCann who turned 70 years old. The birthday man clocked a new age in the New Year. A series of events put together in his honour to mark the milestone birthday added up to a worthy celebration. Not less is expected. Omojafor––Omo Jesu to his friends––is one of Nigeria’s leading figures of marketing communication, one of the iconic ad men who blazed the trail in the integrated marketing communication sector, a man whose name is mentioned in the same breath with advertising czars such as Biodun Shobanjo and Akin Odunsi.
At 70, he has reached many peaks––Group Head, Lintas’ Client Service; President, Association of Advertising Practitioners of Nigeria (AAPN); Chairman, Zenith bank Plc; Chairman STB-McCann–– for a life that started from a humble beginning.
After studying Mass Communication at the University of Lagos, he worked as a journalist at Daily Times, progressing as far as sub editor before he doffed the toga of newsman and put on the cloak of an ad man by joining the client service department of Lintas Advertising. Few years after, he teamed up with Akin Odunsi and Tunde Adelaja to form Rosabel Advertising. Three young men who left the safe and secure roofs of big-name agencies like Admark and Lintas and took off into the wilderness of uncertain future, searching for fame and fortune.
They did what innovators do––challenge the status quo, cause a paradigm shift, push the boundaries–– and Rosabel rose to roaring success. Their tour de force became an inspiration and a catalyst for the emergence of other indigenous agencies including Insight Communication that came a year later in 1979. Rosabel, continuing its trailblazing run, founded STB-McCann. Becoming its pioneer chief executive gave Omojafor the latitude to prove his mettle and he took it to a high altitude, a success so resounding STB-McCann became inseparable from the name Steve Omojafor. Till date. This advertising story is a well-known folktale.
What is not well known is the other facet of his life. His boardroom engagement. Yes, this ad man is also a board man. A dozen year as a non-executive director of Zenith Bank Plc, including four years as the chairman, is not a credential of a boardroom neophyte. My boss, Mike Awoyinfa and I sat down with him a few months ago to discuss the subject of boardroom for the upcoming business book “Boardroom Leadership and Corporate Governance.” On a hot afternoon, inside the STB-McCann office in Ikeja, we asked him hot questions about boardroom issues, starting with the questions anyone would like to ask him most: what is the relevance of an advertising man to the board of a bank? How does your expertise in marketing communication serve the board of a financial institution as Zenith Bank? Is your inclusion on the board not akin to putting a square peg in a round hole?
Omojafor retraces the trajectory of his boardroom odyssey. “My first board experience was at Rosabel Advertising. When Rosabel grew, we varied more people onto the board. When we started STB-McCann, I became its board chairman, while another partner was chairman of Rosabel board, and we had common meetings. They attended STB McCann’s board meetings; I attended Rosabel’s.”
His horizon was subsequently broadened beyond the world of advertising, Rosabel and STB-McCann by invitations to the board of companies outside the marketing communication niche, such as the Institute of Human Virology, a not-for-profit organisation, based in Abuja. It was in this fashion that the Zenith Bank’s invitation came, which Omojafor says “was the toughest for me.”
He says: “All the others, I could manage, because whatever businesses they did were not too different from what I have started doing years back. But I have never been into finance. I have never been in banking. I didn’t study finance or banking. So, my invitation to the board made me ask them: Why me? What qualifies me?”
“Your name, your integrity is the first criteria for your being invited.” So they told him. Integrity––a quality that appears to have become a scarce commodity nowadays; a trait that is the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the national reality scandal dubbed Dasukigate by the media; the attribute sages of the boardroom we have interviewed so far concurred is the soul of the board. Integrity makes a man. A man of honour. A man of his word. A man who can be trusted.
Omojafor, current chairman of Board Governance, Nominations & Remuneration Committee, Zenith Bank Plc, explains the connection between his expertise and bank directorship in the context of board diversity: “Whatever your expertise or your area of discipline, it must have a bearing on board issues. As a board chairman whose métier is marketing communication, the utility of my experience is more about my expertise on the customer of a bank. When the board discusses communication, for instance, we don’t need to go too far; I tell them off the cuffs if what we are doing is right or wrong; I advise on how best to improve on advertising, how to improve on corporate marketing, how to improve on relationship with customers. I am useful in helping the board understand the customer.”
American writer Mark Twain summed up the significance of his 70th birthday thus: “It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach—unrebuked.” Those few months ago, Omojafor had reflected on a trend he found disturbing: “A lot of time these days, I hear people say “what is the point in going to the university?” They make examples of people who got bachelor degrees but went into fashion designing or music; or university-trained doctors who abandoned their professions to become musicians. We must not throw this away: that those three or four years spent going through university discipline stays with you all your life; when you find yourselves in unrelated areas, you fall back on your university knowledge, drawing from those little, little techniques and know-how you learnt at the university.
“A lot of the people who became chief executives and chairmen didn’t study a discipline related to the kind of companies they are heading today. There are lot of things that you learn on your way to the top that continue to propel you on and on. You must have an inquisitive mind–that, you learn from school. You must be able to analyse situation. You learn that from school too. You have got to listen. You have got to analyse. These are basic ingredients.”
The man who led STB-McCann, the Coke ad agency, for many years also talks of his leadership style which he sums up as putting on the table “what I know and listening to what my contemporaries and subordinates know.”
He is particular about his disposition to running every business as a team. “A team has the strong, as well as the weak. The ability to merge the strength and the weakness and come up with a strong corporate entity is what makes an effective leader.”
Three scores and 10 years is a long walk through life. Sir Steve Omojafor’s life mirrors those values and virtues we preach to the younger ones as ingredients of a successful life––be the captain of your ship, be diligent at what you do, dare to venture, keep a good name (it is worth more than gold). The advertising man lives a life that is good to go for an ad about a good life (or the good of life). Here is wishing him many happy returns.
SUN
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