Battle against corruption brought couple together

In 2003 a hip-hop artist in Sierra Leone recorded an upbeat dance groove with some unlikely lyrics. The English translation of the Krio is something like "mismanagement, bankruptcy, unaccountability" and "no electricity, bad sanitation."

The song, called "Corruption e do so" ("Corruption: Enough Is Enough"), became a pan-African hit, and the album became the most popular in the history of Sierra Leone.

The singer/songwriter of "Corruption" is Daddy Saj, aka Joseph Gerald Adolphus Cole. Since last fall, Saj has been living in Utah, in the little town of Providence, after marrying Cache County native Ann Norman. It was the battle against corruption, and a shared tendency to say what they think, that brought Saj and Norman together.

Norman is a farm girl from Paradise who went on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Paris, graduated from Utah State University, got a job in public relations in New York and ended up raising private money for United Nations microloan programs for the world's poorest countries. In the summer of 2005 she made a quick stop in Sierra Leone, the West African country that by U.N. ranking is the poorest of the poor.

A few months later, back in New York, Norman got a phone call from the U.N. office in Sierra Leone. The president of the country, she was told, was starting a new program to combat media corruption following a devastating decadelong war, and he wanted her help.

"I said, 'I don't know the first thing about any of that, but I'll see if I can find someone else who does,"' Norman remembers telling the U.N. officer. "No," he told her "they want you."

Later, after Norman did, indeed, move to Sierra Leone to help President Tejan Kabbah with his communications campaign, she discovered why she had made such a favorable first impression. "They said, 'You weren't afraid of us and you're bossy. ... You were bold enough to say what you thought."'

"A blabbermouth," is how Norman describes herself. "My M.O.," she says, "is 'when bad stuff happens, tell someone."'

Meanwhile, Daddy Saj already had established himself as the boldest singer in Sierra Leone.

His song "Corruption" was "the talk of the town," remembers Chukwu Adeyemi Paul, a journalist for Sierra Express Media. "People thought he would be locked up. It was risky for his life and his family, to come out and slam (the government)." The song encouraged other people to talk publicly about corruption, Paul says, and other singers followed with similar songs.