In the powerful origin episode of Emeka Unscripted, Emeka Edwin-Nweze shares his extraordinary journey from surviving civil war in Sierra Leone to building one of Australia’s fastest-growing healthcare organisations, Neta Care Holistic Health Services. Born to a Sierra Leonean mother and Nigerian father, Emeka’s childhood was shaped by conflict, courage, and faith. From military raids and childhood captivity to the moment his mother risked everything to rescue him, this is a story of raw survival and purpose. Emeka reveals how those early lessons in leadership, pain, and compassion forged his vision for a unified healthcare model, one that integrates medical, allied, and disability care into a single system of dignity and excellence.

In this episode:

Surviving civil war and family separation in West Africa
Lessons in courage and integrity from his late father
Overcoming loss, trauma, and child slavery to rebuild purpose
Discovering leadership through military discipline and faith
Founding Neta Care, Australia’s one-stop holistic health solution
Why adversity creates empathy, and empathy builds legacy
From War Child to CEO: Who is Emeka Edwin-Nweze is more than a biography, it’s a blueprint for turning pain into purpose and vision into impact.

Watch on Youtube: Who is Emeka Edwin-Nweze?

Transcript

I was born in Sierra Leone. My mum was Sierra Leonian. My dad's Nigerian. I was born to a family that was just your typical nuclear family. However, living in Sierra Leone, it was quite a war torn environment both civil war and all the external factors influencing war within the nation.

There's a lot of fear because there's a lot of loud sounds, a lot of banging, a lot of staying home because of restrictions. There is stuff going down outside. You wouldn't come out for days, weeks at a time, months sometimes.

We had the military break into our home to essentially get my dad. They were told that there was a rebel living in our home and it was my father. They literally smashed the glass and came in. My dad tried to get me secure, placed me in one of the rooms and hid me under the bed, asked my mom to go do the same. But I watched my dad through the key hole of a door. I watched him address and confront people breaking into his house and coming in to get his family, saying, "I can't allow you to do this."

Thankfully, one of the individuals there recognised him as a pastor who had been speaking to them at the military base way back when. Naturally, what would have happened was they would have killed him. My mother would have been abused and the rest of us would have been killed in the house, burnt, or they would have taken me at the very least to be a part of the military. That recognition was essentially what saved my dad's life and my family's life because my dad had been in the community so much and was so well-known and so well-respected for what he did and his selfless nature of always putting others first to his own detriment. That character saved his life and saved my entire family's life.

For me, that was one of the standout times of what it meant to be a man that has a home - you need to support that home and there are times where you very much need to take a big, bold, brave step.

My dad passed away when I was 8 years old, which was another pivotal moment in my life. We had to make a big bold move and my mother decided that she would take him back to his homeland, which was Nigeria in the state of Anambra, for his burial.

That set off a chain of events that was really quite brutal for the life of our family in the next steps. It was everything from living with a with a new set of family - my dad's family - that we really didn't know and that treated my mum very bad (for lack of a better term) - very different culturally from what we had grown up with.

At one point, we were kidnapped from my mum and taken into very, very difficult environment. As a child (I think I would have been an 8-year-old, 9 year-old), there's no other real term to describe it other than child slavery. So that was a very, very difficult time for me and certainly my siblings as well.

I had two younger brothers and they were in the thick of it. They were a lot younger, so a little bit less expectations from them. I am like 5 years older than my brother next after me. I spent a lot of time supporting and protecting them like the very little that I had known and learned from my dad. I really became their protector, their father, their everything while being a child, not really knowing much about how to do that, but having learned a thing or two from seeing my dad go out in the thick of war and provide for us.

You know that's the extreme. You learn a lot from that as a child. I was forced to grow up. I was forced to become a man really early and really I remember at like the age of 10 I was really playing that role of my brother's protector. Even in that space that we were, both of my brothers were eventually taken. One brother was given back to my mum and the other one was taken to another family.

I remained in sort of the the worst of the situations for probably another 2 years after that point.

I remember one day coming back from school and I had a blinding migraine. It was so bad I couldn't see. I couldn't think. But I was walking home under the hot sun. I got home and I was instructed that I couldn't have anything to eat - after a long day at school and not having had anything to eat. I couldn't have anything to eat until I did some chores. That was just the treatment I went through at that time. That moment like forever got scarred into my head, because I remember one of the chores I had to do was kneel under the hot sun while I did some dishes with the water that I had fetched earlier that day at 5:00 a.m. from a 6 kilometer journey up and down. I remembered that moment thinking, “God this sucks. I don't want to be here. Why? Why am I here? Can something different happen now? I think it's time that something changes in my life ‘cause this cannot be it.”

I remember thinking that as a very young child - I’m talking like 11-years-old or something like that. That was quite a moment for me, because I had a little prayer in that moment that if I get out of this, I'll forever dedicate my life to creating and living a legacy and creating something unique in our world.

It was not too long after that moment actually that I was delivered from that whole scenario. My mum found me and rescued me. It was quite the intense very dramatic rescue - almost like what you might see in a movie played out in real life. My mum deceived some people and grabbed me - placed me in like a motorbike and had me sent off with someone, while she jumped on another one. And it was quite fun. The whole time, I didn't even know what was happening actually. I was like, “What are we doing, mum? Like what's happening?”

But those sequences of events (and I've skipped quite a lot of intense moments in life) really set me up and and built character and gave me this inspiration to become who I was going to be.

I never went through like a rebellious teenage phase. I was just always had goals and targets and things to do in life, so I just did them.

The military had a lot of really incredible things to offer me which was really genuinely teaching me a leadership structure of management and leadership to achieve outcomes and being goal-driven and how to coordinate the troops.

The best part about what I learned there is I believe that the military one of the reasons that it's sustained is because it has a lot of money because it's funded by the government at a federal level to pour into it. Most things that are not done well can be covered when there is an abundance of money. But when you don't have money, it forces you to be intentional and strategic about achieving outcomes, especially in the leadership space because you don't have the currency of money to get people to buy in. The only currency you have is through genuine buy in of individuals that you lead so you can journey with them through it.

I got that through the military, because at the same time I also was in a leadership space through a church. So I got to experience what not to do and then practice what to do, live, all at the same time.

That led me into kind of being the kind of leader that can take a company from like a zero revenue to where we got in significant revenue of of millions and now leading about 550 odd people at the time of speaking here in a such a short period of time.

2020 everything changed. I was in the military at the start of it, and then I wasn't. I needed to do something else that was a little bit different, but I realized that maybe I truly actually do enjoy caring for people.

When I got out of the military, I actually got out with an injury myself - a spinal injury that leaves me in a lot of pain for the majority of my life and my wake/work hours. And so for me one of the thought processes I went through early in the day was “If my pain and the condition that I left the military with was escalated and I became so incapacitated, I needed this kind of support around me, what kind of support would I like to get? How would I like that care to be delivered to me? Do I want to be going 10 different places to get my healthcare delivered each week or do I want to just go to the one place and they know me really well and they can deliver that healthcare really well?”

And certainly, the latter was my preference. When I looked around, the latter is a preference for most people. So why not really go down that path and do it well? That really explains why for me it's never been about earning from doing this. It's always been about creating such a legacy service that delivers healthcare so well that I will want to have my healthcare delivered that way. And so I thought “Well. Why isn't there a solution here - where a person just needed to go to the one place, a one-stop shop health-solution that will provide for their medical needs through their general practitioner, their allied health or therapeutic needs, as well as their direct care needs? But even better, what happens if these three areas really talked - they were really working together and they really knew their client (or the patient or the participant, whatever you might call them)? What happens if they knew them really well and they were discussed through clinical meetings? How can we actually assist this person to get the life goals they're looking for or to have a better quality of life?”

And what I discovered through the process of forming this with Neta Care was that realistically and genuinely, if those things were working in a really tight collaboration, the quality of life and the ability to achieve health goals or life goals for a person with a lifelong disability is so much more achievable. Do we get to the end result at a much quicker pace?

Which means that people with lifelong disabilities don't have to spend a lot of time driving around from one person to the other and reexplaining themselves - what do they need and how do they want to make things work. That's really where it was birthed from.

Well, initially, I was told, “There's a reason it's not done. There's a reason that people don't go to one place to get everything done - because it's just too difficult to coordinate that.”

And I thought, “Well, why not? Because the hospital does it. The hospital is a one-stop shop health solution. The hospital has the doctors there, the nurses, care workers, the therapeutic services; It's all under the one roof. Why don't we bring that model and essentially do the same thing?”

And I was told, “It's an expensive endeavor, which is why most hospitals are owned and run by government.”

And so I thought, “Okay. Well, challenge accepted. Let's see if we can make it happen.”

Back to the journey, and what they said was true. It was a very complex system to put together and especially for a person that came from an engineering background. Putting together a clinically capable practice of multidisiplinary teams was challenging, but we kept working at it and bit by bit we got there.

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