MY CAREER HAS BEEN A REAL JOURNEY
‘MY CAREER HAS BEEN A REAL JOURNEY’ For many people reading this, media mogul and entrepreneur Mosunmola Abudu (you can call her Mo!) will need no introduction. Forbes dubbed her Africa’s most successful woman; The Hollywood Reporter, one of the ‘25 Most Powerful Women in Global Television’; CNN, ‘Africa’s Oprah’. But long before her breakthrough TV show Moments with Mo or her pan-African TV channel EbonyLife TV were even in embryo, Mo had a past life as, among other things, a model, an Avon brand ambassador and an HR professional. Born in West London, but with family roots in South West Nigeria, Mo split her formative years between Nigeria and the UK, something Mo feels gave her “the best of both worlds”. “For all intents and purposes, I’m actually British, but for me I identify more with being Nigerian,” she says. “The culture of Nigeria is something that has never left me. It’s something that I’ve grown accustomed to.” Mo’s Nigerian grandmother, in particular, had a huge influence on her when she was growing up, she says, instilling in her the values of honesty, integrity and hard work. Most importantly, she says, her grandmother taught her to always be content with what she has. “Being content doesn’t mean you can’t dream of more,” she says. “Because I’ve always wanted to do big things.” When Mo embarked upon Westminster’s Manpower MA, almost 30 years ago, she was already balancing her recruitment career with caring for her young daughter.
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At the time, Westminster was one of the few universities to offer this course, she explains, and the degree of flexibility it offered was equally rare. “I’d always wanted to go to a uni where I felt a sense of freedom and I felt that you could just get into the mix and you could still manage the rest of your life at the same time,” Mo says. “I liked the fact that it was really going to be about me and the freedom to just work at uni, work at home and get the results I wanted.” After completing her Masters in 1993, Mo returned to Nigeria. As well as heading ExxonMobil’s national Human Resources and Training unit, she also established Vic Lawrence & Associates, now one of the country’s leading HR consultancies. Here, perhaps, the story could have come to an end, but for Mo it was merely a prologue. The decades that followed saw her create, produce and host her own talk show, Moments With Mo (with famous
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guests including Hillary Clinton) before launching EbonyLife TV in 2006, a network currently airing in more than 49 countries across Africa, as well as the UK and the Caribbean. Mo established EbonyLife Films in 2014. Since then, the company has produced three of Nigeria’s biggest films of all time, including Mo’s first film as executive producer, Fifty (2015), and The Wedding Party, a 2016 collaboration with The ELFIKE Collective, which became Nigeria’s highest-grossing film of all time. Following high-profile collaborations with Sony and AMC Networks (USA), EbonyLife has just signed a deal with Netflix to create original TV series and Netflix-branded films for its global streaming service. “It’s the first deal of its type ever to be signed in Africa and in Nigeria,” Mo explains. “It’s what’s called a multiple deal in that we have a slate of projects that we’re going to be rolling out over the next few years.”
