Timothy Musa Kabba was captured twice by Sierra Leone rebels, compelled as a child to carry heavy head-loads through hazardous bush terrain and forced to witness atrocities that traumatised his young mind — wounds that he says ultimately healed during a long and tortuous journey to salvation.

Born to Muslim parents in the village of Tongo Fields, a mining community whose war-time travails were dramatised in the 2006 film Blood Diamond, Kabba schooled first at Kenema’s Holy Trinity and then at St Francis Secondary School in Makene, where his mother found work as a midwife.

When soldiers from the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group ejected militia from the capital in 1997, the rebels moved their base to Makene and began raiding schools for recruits.

“I was rescued by the same soldiers that attacked the rebel positions in Kabala but it happened again in 1999 after which I became a displaced person, eventually finding my way to Fourah Bay College in the capital, Freetown, to start a mechanical engineering course, which I never completed,” Kabba recalls.

An opportunity arose in Russia to study petroleum engineering at St Petersburg Mining University, where Kabba also completed a master’s programme, working every vacation to get by, as the stipend from his war-ravaged homeland dried up as soon as he arrived.

“I had no idea the railway ran so close to my hostel window, so when the first train rattled past I panicked and ran outside with my passport into the bitter cold,” he says. “People were laughing.”

Times were hard but eased by sponsorship from Lukoil and Rosneft in equal measure.

“After three years, my professors helped me land a vacation job with Rosneft at its Neftyugansk oil field deep in the Siberian forest. We lived in minus-50, constantly cold, and everyone drank vodka to survive,” he says.

Kabba, who returned to the Islam of his youth after 20 years a converted Christian, believes that “it is hope and conflict that dictate our life on Earth”.

But it was after his graduation, in 2010, that the real roller-coaster ride began.

Career moves

Rosneft assigned him to the Komi Republic as a reservoir engineer on the Usinky field, pumping highly viscous oil by deploying beam pumps to inject steam in freezing temperatures. Then Lukoil jumped in, despatching him to model the Alibekmola pre-salt in the Caspian Sea.

Desk work followed, with Kabba assigned to Moscow in support of Lukoil’s Kazakhstan team and then to a new base in Dubai, from where he worked several onshore wells in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. Kabba was next promoted to a drilling engineer post on Iraq’s West Qurna 2 oilfield near Basra.

In 2013, he was assigned to drill Lukoil’s SL-5-11 on the Savannah structure off Sierra Leone, then to Ghana for the Dzata appraisal and exploration off Ivory Coast before heading to Nigeria on secondment with Total for deep-water completions.

“This was definitely a step up for me, moving to the rigs and working the smaller prospects off the coast of West Africa,” he says.

He recalls a helicopter crash off the Ghanaian coast on 8 May, 2014, while he was working aboard the Transocean semi-submersible GSF Jack Ryan on Ghana’s Lynx-1x re-entry.

Kabba was the last passenger to disembark before the routine crew shuttle returned.

“Four of my friends died,” he says. “There had to be a reason I was left to survive, and I believe God has a purpose for me.”

It was while working in Sierra Leone that Kabba was noticed by then-opposition leader Julius Maada Bio, who later visited him in Ivory Coast.

Bio again sought him out after winning presidential elections in April this year, two months later appointing him director general of the Petroleum Directorate.

Reviving exploration

“He offered me a free hand with support of relevant ministries to re-energise staff at the Directorate and revive exploration which, if properly managed, can deliver the oil dividend and alleviate suffering in this country,” Kabba says.

Kabba immediately suspended the offshore licensing round begun by his predecessor, citing bad timing and a dearth of industry interest, but anticipates better luck this year as corporate budgets have improved along with an appetite for frontier exploration.

“If you hit the right point in the cycle, you get the right companies,” he says.

He believes his origins in the private sector will help restore investor confidence and attract responsible suitors.

“If necessary, we can rewrite the law and adjust the framework to encourage onshore exploration,” he says.

Ever keen to advance the agenda of Sierra Leone's Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Kabba wants to ensure only serious companies come forward.

“I hate companies that seek to do business by corrupt means,” he warns, “and those that would confront me with such tendencies.”

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Kabba set to put Sierra Leone on oil and gas map