Lolia Kienka embodies the axiom that one can soar in any profession she chooses, once she dedicates herself to excellence in that field. The award-winning Shaw University (North Carolina, U.S.) tennis captain, who graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Business Management and International Relations, has successfully transitioned from a sporting amazon to a top business manager overseeing major, sensitive positions around the world.

In an educational and professional career that has taken her through schools in the United Kingdom and the United States, Kienka’s passion has always centred on the discipline of turning potential into performance. “I was raised on a tennis court before I fully understood what discipline meant, and that early education shaped everything that followed: the belief that talent is only ever a starting point, and that what separates people is what they do with the hours nobody is watching,” she says.

“That conviction carried me from national junior tennis championships to a business degree in the United States, a master’s degree in the United Kingdom, and a decade across five organisations spanning fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), financial technology, construction technology and now energy.

“The industries have changed; the passion for doing difficult things well, and for a purpose larger than myself, has not. It is also why, outside of my day job, I make time to coach tennis, teach life skills and mentor young people, particularly girls and young women who remind me of myself at that age, before anyone had told them what they were capable of.”

Reviewing her career trajectory, Kienka says that it has not been linear in the conventional sense, “but it has been consistent in direction, and it began, unusually, on a tennis court.”

Looking back on her early years, she says: “I won national junior titles through my teenage years, then took up a full athletic scholarship, in addition to academic awards, at Shaw University in North Carolina, where I captained the women’s tennis team and graduated summa cum laude with a double major in Business Management and International Relations. I returned to Nigeria for my National Youth Service Corps year, then completed a master’s degree at the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom, again graduating with distinction.

“My professional career began in 2016, when I was recruited into Nestlé Nigeria, progressing from Field Sales and Category Development (Marketing) roles into Corporate Communications and Public Affairs. From there, I moved to Diageo, then the parent company of Guinness Nigeria, where I worked in experiential and commercial managerial roles across the organisation’s luxury and premium brand portfolios. I then moved into financial technology as Head of Growth and Expansion at Advancly, driving the company’s growth across five African markets, namely Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, before taking on the role of Country Manager, Nigeria.

“From there, I served as Vice President, Commercial at Cutstruct Technology, a construction-technology company, and then as Head of Corporate Business at Nevadic, an oil, gas and renewable energy firm, before joining Brass Fertilizer and Petrochemical Company Limited (now Brass Petrochemical Company Limited), a joint-venture mega-project, in October 2025 as Director, Corporate Services and Government Relations.

“Each step has been deliberate, including founding two ventures of my own along the way: Gamedey and Kurtsy Lolia. Throughout my career, I have consistently looked for the harder problem rather than the safer one.”

Kienka names her parents as the most influential people in her life and career. “My father, Godwin Kienka, was an international sports correspondent with the News Agency of Nigeria before he founded a tennis academy at the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club in 1987, and he is the reason I picked up a racket at four years old.

“He built the athletic discipline into us. My mother, Rita Kienka, a retired District Counsellor for Lagos State and a multi-award-winning therapeutic counsellor in Nigeria, built everything that discipline needed to last: the structure at home, the insistence on academic proficiency alongside the sport, the moral compass that has kept me grounded through every stage of my career, and the social ease that has let me move comfortably between a tennis court, a boardroom and a government office. Between them, they raised a complete person, not just a competitor.

“Beyond my parents, I have been fortunate to work alongside strong leaders at every organisation I have passed through, each of whom modelled a different dimension of professionalism I have tried to absorb. More recently, I have drawn inspiration from people like Professor Wale Sulaiman, the Nigerian-born neurosurgeon whose practice spans several countries. He represents what it looks like to be excellent by global standards while remaining unmistakably Nigerian, which is the model I am building my own career toward: that of a global corporate entrepreneur.”

Despite her busy schedule in the corporate world, Kienka still has a burning desire for sports development, and she believes that “sport, run professionally, is one of the most underused tools we have for repositioning Nigeria on the global stage.”

A valued member of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group’s (NESG) Tourism, Hospitality, Entertainment, Creatives, Cultural and Sports Industries Policy Commission (THECCSPC), and a mentor with the National American Football Association’s (NAFA) Gridiron Gems Cluster Mentorship Network, where she supports and guides young girls through mentoring sessions, check-ins and meaningful conversations, she adds:

“What it requires is the same rigour we would expect of any serious industry: transparent structures for talent identification, real investment in coaching and facilities, and a mindset that treats sport as a genuine career pathway rather than a hobby competing with ‘real’ education. Having played competitively, and having since spent a decade in corporate boardrooms, I can say with confidence that both worlds demand the same underlying disciplines: planning, performance under pressure, and accountability for results. When we bring that standard of professionalism to how we run sport in Nigeria, we do not just produce athletes; we produce disciplined, resilient young people who go on to excel in whatever field they choose, and we strengthen the case for Nigeria as a well-run country to investors and partners watching from outside.”

Kienka draws on her experience as a former junior tennis star to argue that the country can become one of the best, if things are done the right way.

“My father’s academy is proof of what is possible with very little: it has produced national champions for close to four decades from a single set of courts at the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club, running largely on private commitment rather than public investment. What I would like to see is that model multiplied and formalised: public-private partnerships that bring corporate sponsors into grassroots tennis the way they already invest in football, structured pipelines connecting junior clubs to national training centres with real equipment budgets, and partnerships with international federations that make ball machines, stringing services and proper hard courts available beyond Lagos and Abuja. Nigeria has never lacked talent. What it has lacked is consistent access to the tools that turn talent into world-class technique, and closing that gap, deliberately and at scale, is the single most impactful investment we could make in the sport.”

She entreats parents to allow their children to make their own career choices, whether in sport, academics or otherwise, guiding them through the process while ensuring that neither becomes an excuse to neglect the other.

“My parents built our entire childhood around what I call a triangle: school, tennis and extra academic lessons, with very little room left over for anything else. It was hard, and there were seasons I resented it. But it taught me that hard work and multitasking are not talents you are born with; they are habits you are trained into as a child, and they stay with you for life.

“I encourage parents to resist the temptation to treat sport as a distraction from ‘serious’ education, or academics as separate from athletic discipline. Structured properly, they reinforce each other. Insist on real coaching and real academic support, not just enthusiasm. Passion without structure produces hobbyists, not champions.”

Kienka, who also serves as Director of Partnerships and Sponsorship at the Innovation and Scale Forum (ISF), a pan-African convening that brings together over 3,000 founders, investors, government ministers and enterprise leaders, alongside its own Innovation and Scale Awards, to align technology, capital, enterprise and policy behind scaling Africa’s innovations for global markets, sees idle time as one of the biggest risk factors for youth malfeasance, and picks sport as one of the most effective, and currently underfunded, ways to remove it.

She implores government to start by investing seriously in community sporting infrastructure, “not only national stadiums for elite competition, but local courts, pitches and coaching programmes that give ordinary young people somewhere structured to put their energy. Beyond infrastructure, we need scholarship pathways that make it clear that excelling in sport is a legitimate route to a scholarship, a career, even higher education, both locally and abroad. This way, young people see a future worth staying disciplined for.

“Mentorship matters too; pairing young athletes with professionals, in sport and outside it, gives them role models and accountability beyond their immediate peer group. None of this is complicated. It requires sustained funding and follow-through, which has historically been a greater impediment than our ideas.”