Tribute
By Kortor Kamara, USA
With the passing yesterday June 2, 2020 of Mr Sheku Gibril Kamara in Freetown, the doyen of the Sierra Leone insurance industry and the last of its titians, Sierra Leone has lost not only a risk management professional but a public and private sector insurance innovator and entrepreneur of international repute.
As the first indigenous Sierra Leonean General Manager and Managing Director of the National Insurance Company (NIC), Mr Sheku Kamara (pictured) was indeed a trailblazer, who brought and made insurance accessible to the common Sierra Leonean in the early 1970s.
As owner, Chairman and Managing Director of the Medical and General Insurance Company (MAGIC), Mr. Kamara served as an entrepreneurial trailblazer and visionary businessman whose insurance products are still in the market place.
As a founding father of the WAICA, he played a pioneering role in not only the establishment of the sub-regional insurance association and institution, but truly believed in its objectives, that he regularly sent NIC employees for training at its Liberia and later Gambia based institute.
As a progressive manager, he was instrumental in hiring and launching the careers of several renowned insurance professionals and practitioners, including such NIC alumni, as former president Ernest Bai Koroma, the current SLICOM chairman, Mr Arthur Yaskey, Mr Solomon Samba of Aureol, Hon Minkailu Mansaray, Mrs Gladys Strasser- King of Cresmet, Mrs Alice Onomake of Ritcorp, Mr Sourie Turay of London, myself and several others through the years.
He was the first insurance General Manager to actively recruit university graduates into the industry and set up an all inclusive marketing department, manned largely by trained university graduates charged with bringing insurance products to a larger population.
I first met Mr. Kamara (no relation) in December 1981, when I was recruited and hired while teaching at CKC, Bo. I was assigned to the claims department as an Insurance Officer, with my direct supervisor the then Assistant Claims Manager, former President Ernest Bai Koroma. I subsequently was transferred to the Marine underwriting department to serve as the underwriting superintendent, a position I held until I left Sierra Leone in 1985 for further studies in the US.
During a visit he made to Los Angeles in the early 2000’s we were again reunited, together with another NIC alumni Doris Matturi, and thus started our most productive collaborative insurance sector collaboration work.
Following his visit to the US, when he visited my insurance workplace, I was made a technical partner and out of country director on his company, MAGIC.
Through training sessions he organized for his MAGIC staff, which I served as a featured trainer, his offering to me of shares in his company, our work in drafting the first title insurance policy in Sierra Leone, organizing of the inaugural international Freetown insurance seminar in 2012 and above all reinsurance placements for his company in the US, Mr. Sheku Kamara cemented his transformational credentials.
I extend my sincere condolences to his wife and family and the broader MAGIC insurance company and Sierra Leone insurance industry on the passing of a such a larger than life patriot whose pioneering contributions to our industry and country shall forever remain unsurpassed.
May his soul rest in peace!
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