Among the veteran Emirati personalities who accompanied the founder of the UAE, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, may God rest his soul, was apprenticed by him, and was always present in his full council, but rather was a witness to the era of developmental transformations and renaissance in the country since the early founding of the Union in 1971, contributing to it with his knowledge, dedication, and sincerity, and bearing the burdens of official responsibilities. The name of His Excellency Dr. Mana Saeed Al Otaiba, the minister, politician, advisor, poet, writer, and businessman, but rather the man who assumed the leadership of the oil and petroleum industries in his country, and whose voice was in international forums, stands out.
And the defender of its oil rights for three continuous decades, from 1969 until 1990. His Excellency has proven his worth in assuming all the responsibilities and positions that have been entrusted to him since he took the position of Chairman of the Petroleum Department in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi from 1969 to 1971. After that he held the position of Minister of Petroleum and Industry in the Government of Abu Dhabi between 1971 and 1972, before carrying the oil and mineral wealth portfolio in the second federal ministerial formation in 1973 headed by the late Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, “May God rest his soul in peace,” and until he left in 1990 from the fifth federal government, which was also headed by the late Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid Al Maktoum, “May God rest his soul in peace.”
The minister belongs to the Al-Otaiba family from the well-known Al-Otaiba clan, which is among the largest and most important families in the UAE and the Arabian Gulf, and was among the clans that formed the historic Bani Yas alliance, noting that the Otaiba are descended from the honorable Arab tribe of Al-Marar, whose lineage goes back to the fourth Umayyad caliph Marwan bin Al Hakam. As for the family of His Excellency. Dr. Manea Saeed Al-Otaiba, they traded in natural pearls, and for this purpose they frequented the visit to India, and they continued for many years until the activity of fishing and trading in pearls began with the emergence of Japanese artificial pearls and the discovery and export of oil.
His Excellency Dr. Mana Saeed Al Otaiba was born in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi on the fifteenth of May 1946, which coincided with the night of the twenty-seventh of Ramadan. Due to the recession of the natural pearl market in the late 1940s, and the conditions of his family were affected by that transformation, where he moved in 1952 to live in Qatar, where he studied the stages of his formal education in its schools until he completed high school in 1963. After that, he traveled to Britain on scholarship from an oil company British Qatar because of his superiority.
In Britain, he enrolled for two years in one of the higher colleges, where he learned and practiced the English language and got acquainted with the culture of the West. He came into contact for the first time with different foreign nationalities and learned a lot from them, to return to his homeland and travel from there again, to Iraq to join the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at the University of Baghdad, from which he graduated in 1969. .
In 1974, he obtained a master’s degree from the Faculty of Economics and Political Science at Cairo University for a thesis on the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which had been established in September 1960. In 1976, he obtained a Ph. Thesis titled “Petroleum and the Economics of the UAE”.
It was not enough for Dr. Mana Saeed Al-Otaiba with the high academic degrees he attained, so he later decided to invest his spare time in obtaining a higher university degree in Arabic literature, which was among the areas that he loved and preoccupied with since his childhood, so he had what he wanted. Muhammad bin Abdullah University in the Moroccan city of Fez awarded him a Ph.D. with a very good grade in 2000 for a dissertation entitled “The Discourse of Pan-Arabism in Literary Poetry.”
