How I Made It: Striking Sustainable Success In Sierra Leone

HOW I MADE IT

STRIKING SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS IN SIERRA LEONE

Modupe Taylor-Pearce

&

Brian James

Copyright © 2014 Modupe Taylor-Pierce.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1908-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-1909-1 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 10/7/2014

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Lara Taylor-Pearce

Claudius Bart-Williams

Isha Johansen

Jimmy Bangura

Olabisi Claudius - Cole

Joe Abass Bangura

Helen Keili

Valesius Thomas

Christiana Thorpe

Bishop Frederick Abu Koroma

Ayo Johnson

Wilben Short

Andrina Coker

Kosonike Koso-Thomas

Bernadette Cole

Leonard Gordon—Harris

Gladys Strasser-King

Akiwande Lasite

Yarie Kabia

Ekundayo Thompson

Afterword

Discussion Guide

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all Sierra Leoneans who aspire to be successful and significant leaders

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, our thanks go to Almighty God who put into each one of us the potential for successful leadership. He led us, the authors, to compile this book which reveals the leadership secrets of successful Sierra Leonean leaders so we could share them with our readers.

We thank our families for their unflinching support. You inspire us to be better leaders.

In addition to our families, we say thank you to Dr. J.E. Modupe Taylor-Pearce, for agreeing to be a member of the three-man committee that was set up to choose the twenty interviewees whose stories are told in this book. You are a role model par excellence and were it not for the fact that your biography, detailing your successful leadership style has already been written you would have been one of the subjects of this book.

We thank each of the twenty people who willingly agreed to take time off their busy schedules to tell their stories. This is one of the hallmarks of great and successful leaders. They are never too busy to devote time to a worthy cause. In this case, they graciously shared their stories with us so we could share them with others.

Many thanks to Mr. George Bindi and Mrs. Williette James for conducting some of the interviews for us, and to Mr. Ansu Vandi and Mr. Habibu Turay for transcribing the interviews. The photos of most of the interviewees were taken by Mr. George Bindi, and for that we are grateful. We are also grateful to Mr. Tolu Bade, who designed the lovely book cover.

Profound thanks to our Editor, Esme James, who took on the task because she has a heart for helping and encouraging young leaders to discover their talents and use them to lead successful and significant lives.

Preface

Monday, January 15, 1995 – twelve miles north of the town of Masiaka, Sierra Leone.

My heart pounds in my ears even above the sound of gunfire all around. Adrenaline pumps in my veins as bullets whistle past me with deadly intent. I am leading a small group of thirty soldiers that I had hastily marshalled from my Masiaka-based unit in response to reports that Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels were approaching Masiaka from Rogbere Junction.

We engaged with the rebels about twelve miles north of Masiaka. While returning fire, I attempted to outflank the enemy by leading three of my men through a dangerous ‘dead zone’ of enemy fire to wrap around the enemy and attack them from two different positions. While crossing through this zone, I was hit by two bullets: one got me in the elbow, making me unable to return fire and the other hit me in the pelvic region, leaving my right leg paralysed and me helpless in the grass. I was about thirty meters from the nearest soldier – thirty meters that seemed like a mile. With a voice now feeble with pain, I struggled desperately to organize my troops, fully conscious that with each passing minute, the likelihood of making it out alive was getting slimmer. For any of my soldiers to traverse the fields of fire that surrounded me was to invite almost certain death.

As I lay there I began thinking about the terrible war that had affected and taken the lives of thousands of Sierra Leoneans. My thoughts also were about where I had come from, and how I’d got here, about my family and the experiences that had brought me to this point in my life. Just a few months earlier, I had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point. I had been part of a programme created with a singular purpose—to groom great leaders. Time-tested qualities such as honour, integrity and fair play had been drummed into us until they had become as much a part of us as our own DNA.

The constant chatter of bullet fire, the yelling and screaming of orders from all directions, reactions to the pain of incoming bullet fire, and the general fog of war brought me back to the present. It must have been only five minutes since my ordeal started but it seemed like five hours. In the distance I could hear the voices of members of my unit shouting to each other as they prepared to rescue me. Eventually, braving unrelenting fire, they literally pulled me out of the jaws of death and carried me to safety.

After I recovered I asked them why they had risked their lives to save me. You were always good to us, sir; you are our leader, and we could not leave you behind, was the reply.

After four years of following, experiencing, learning, and demonstrating the highest standards of leadership at West Point, I had come to Sierra Leone and joined the Army, where poor leadership was everywhere apparent. I witnessed the worst kind of leadership. At the time, it was not uncommon for soldiers to go without their salaries because their commanders had put the money to personal use. In order to survive, some of the soldiers resorted to stealing from civilians!

I was put in command of a unit where I put all my leadership skills into practise. I ensured that everybody got paid on time. Because of this, some soldiers chose to transfer over to my unit. However, I didn’t realise the full extent to which I had impacted the lives of my men until they risked their lives to save mine. Many Unit Commanders lost their lives not to enemy bullets, but to the wrath of the men they had wronged.

After recovering from my war wounds, I eventually returned to the USA, where I enrolled in a Masters program at Cornell University and later joined a Management Consulting Firm. After a decade of practicing and teaching leadership for Fortune 1000 companies in North America and Europe, I was encouraged to tithe my time and skills by providing leadership training pro-bono for people who would not otherwise be able to afford (or be willing to afford) leadership training. My wife and I set up a non-profit organization called Leaders of Godly Character International (LGCI), through which we encouraged the development of leadership by providing free leadership training to people in Sierra Leone and in the USA. We also support children’s education in Sierra Leone. The more I taught about leadership around the world, the more I realized how many people do not ever receive good leadership training (formal or informal), and are therefore faced with almost certain failure. This realization became even more pressing as the leadership training I offered in Sierra Leone took me back to the provinces, and to the places in which I had served and almost died during the Civil War. Even though the war had ended, life had not become much easier for many people, because they still lacked the fundamental knowledge of how to make their lives successful; they still lacked the training in leadership to afford them the opportunity to transform their destinies. The challenge was to reach as many people who needed to be reached and to teach them how to make their lives successful. Conducting seminars was not going to be sufficient; even though, on average, each year, we trained over 3000 people by conducting fifteen seminars; this was still a drop in the bucket of a nation of 6.2 million inhabitants! The idea of writing a leadership book started to push itself into the top of my priority list.

Despite it being a priority, I struggled with the concept of how to write the book in such a manner that it would be easy to read, while communicating the concepts of leadership effectively, and ‘showing the way’ to lasting success. I am not a huge fan of theoretical books, and was determined to avoid authoring one. As I was dealing with this challenge, I attended a lunch organized by DISCET (Diakonia interdenominational Services for Counselling, Evangelism and Teaching), at which speakers from various walks of life gave presentations on how they had become successful. A light bulb came on in my head and I called my co-writer, Brian James. We began discussing potential subjects and the kinds of questions we would ask that centred on success and leadership. We decided to use an interview format so that readers would get a sense that they were talking to and getting into the minds of these people as they described their journeys to success.

Attempting to chronicle the journeys to success of every one of dozens of successful Sierra Leoneans would be an overly ambitious project. So what we did was to select just twenty remarkable men and women from such fields of endeavour as medicine, finance, entertainment, sports and education. These were not ‘one-hit wonders’; they have been successful over time; some of them have been recognized internationally, and some have been recognized nationally for their achievements. Each of them was asked the same questions:

• Talk a little about yourself and how you got to where you are today.

• How did your childhood experiences shape your perspective on life?

• Do you consider yourself a successful person?

• What drives or motivates you?

• How did you handle some of the failures or setbacks you must have encountered along the way?

• What are the keys to your success?

• What was the lowest point in your career?

• Which of your achievements are you most proud of?

• What would be your advice to a young person just starting out in life and wants to make a success of it?

Who is this book for? It is for everyone who desires to be successful. It was written with the youth of Sierra Leone in mind. However, it should prove equally useful to Sierra Leoneans of all ages; it is never too late to adjust one’s behaviour and actions and orient one’s life towards success. It is written for anyone in Sierra Leone that desires to leave a positive mark in their world.

We hope that our younger readers will be inspired by these stories and use them to make intelligent, life-changing decisions, especially with regard to their future. We also hope that like every one of our twenty subjects, they will discover the field of work or study they were meant to be successful in. Each of the people we interviewed is living proof that virtues such as integrity, hard work, vision, and passion not only have a place in the Sierra Leonean environment but are essential for lasting success and significance.

This book is intended to be a recipe for real and lasting success. We can attest to how much our lives have been shaped by books that we have read. We have learned certain principles used by successful people and have put them into practice. The outcome of doing so has been remarkable and that is why we’re convinced that every young person who is aiming at a successful future should read this book.

Modupe Taylor-Pearce

Introduction

Defining success is always a difficult thing to do. The understanding of what it means to be successful differs from person to person. To some, the achievement of building a house, buying a car and putting the kids through school is success. To others, success is the recognition of their contributions to their various fields of professionalism. Success could simply be the achievement of pre-set goals, big or small. For the purpose of this book we selected subjects from various disciplines whose achievements have earned them national and international acclaim or whose outstanding work ethics and passion have propelled them to the very top in their fields. The omission of any personalities in this book in no way suggests that they are not successful enough to be included. There are dozens of Sierra Leoneans who are worthy of admiration and emulation. Many of them go about their business and their lives quietly, choosing to let their success speak for itself. Unfortunately, the younger generation is largely unaware of their existence; thus the constant cry that there are no role models for them to learn from.

Lack of good leadership, (either through formal training or as a consequence of interacting with positive role models), can cause people to make the wrong choices; these in turn, could result in disastrous repercussions for themselves and those around them. Today, scores of young people are living lives that are without direction or purpose. Ask a young man or woman where they see themselves in the next ten years and you almost always get a blank look in return. They allow themselves to drift along in the uncertain and treacherous waters of the ‘system.’ When the system fails them they fade into nothingness, sometimes lashing out through anti-social behaviour, or making life miserable for those closest to them. They rationalise idleness, corruption and criminal behaviour as the only choices they have in a ‘system’ that has failed them.

Young people all over the world struggle with leadership issues. It is not something that comes naturally. Some might argue that there are people born to be leaders, but I believe that everyone is born with varying portions of leadership potential. The challenge is to develop that potential into leadership that brings out the best in themselves and others.

There is a reason why the Bible says, Train up a child in the way he should go so that when he is grown he will not depart from it. In a society where corruption and dishonesty are regarded as virtues, youths are seeing the kind of leadership that brings out the worst in themselves and others. It is the kind of leadership that led to unnecessary loss of life during Sierra Leone’s civil war. It is also the kind of leadership that results in the disgruntlement that is so obvious amongst present-day Sierra Leoneans. Our young people are not learning such virtues as courage, which is the ability and strength of character to hold themselves and others accountable. Nor are they being taught to be men and women of honesty and sincerity. Indeed, the very concept of integrity is regarded by most Sierra Leoneans as an obstacle to personal success; consequently, people of integrity are fast becoming an endangered species in our nation.

The youths are not learning these virtues because no one is teaching them; it is rare for them to witness these virtues being lived or put into practice, and so they do not learn them. In the absence of the virtues, the vices become the norm. The best way to develop our leadership potential in a positive and productive way is to learn from successful leaders. Most people want to be successful, but do not know how