Inusah 'Maazi Okoro' Mohammed: Nima’s online book-loving, bookseller

Real name, Mohammed Inusah, a son of Nima, one of Ghana’s main inner cities – popularly referred to as Zongo. Mention his real name and you are likely to find it hard to get him.

The young, lively man is known more by an alias, Maazi Okoro, a name of an elderly Nigerian. Young as he is, Maazi Okoro reverberates more with him than his real name.

For his 5,000 Facebook friends and followers, Maazi Okoro is a books person. Barely a day goes by without him posting the photo of a book – one that he is reading, one that he may have just delivered to a client or one that he was recommending.

When it comes to book, he is simply the go-to guy. He loves to read, he loves to sell, he loves to discuss books and he loves to write on the side, his blog is equally quite popular.

He shares his experiences with books over the years and what aspirations he seeks going into the future. Crucially, he talks about the impact of social media in his endeavours and the Success Book Club initiative.

In the first of a two-part interview, we hear about how his love for reading started and the impact it's had on him. We also take a peek into Success Book Club and also get to know his top three African and foreign authors.

How the love for reading kicked off - Mother, a school, grandpa and a big brother

My love for books started from when I remember my mum, a teacher now at Oda grabbing me books to read. I still remember her buying me these nursery rhyme books and some of the various fairy tales. Gingerbread man, Three little pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella.

My personal favorite was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Growing up, the school St. Cecilia’s Basic School then one of the best schools in Accra had a positive reading atmosphere with a lot of books in the library. I graduated from the fairy tales to be that young schoolboy who was reading books ‘above’ his level.

My favorite book then was a book titled The Invisible Man. One grandfather of mine who pushed us to read bought another book The Three Devils and other stories for us. That became my local favorite then. By JHS, I had read a considerable number of the African Writers Series, Burning Desire etc.

So I loved reading from childhood. We used to skip makaranta (weekend Islamic school) to go the Nima-Maamobi community library (children section).

But I started active reading, reading for impact when I met Mahmoud Jajah in 2007 and the first book he gave me was Long Walk to Freedom (Mandela’s Autobiography). What lifted everything was The Autobiography of Malcolm X he gave me in 2010.

Top three authors - Africa and overseas

Top three African authors
1. Chinua Achebe, Nigerian great
2. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president
3. Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Kenya and African literary colossus
4. Manasseh Azure Awuni, a Ghanaian journalist, author.

Foreigners
1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. Robin Sharma
3. John C. Maxwell

About Success Book Club

In the words of Inusah: "Success Book Club is an organization formed to give the youth a platform to develop themselves and make a monumental impact in their communities and world at large."

As its name suggests, it is built on principles of sharing the reading culture. It has quite a following as they meet to dilate on selected reading materials.

Despite initiatives like this, Inusah maintains that Ghana’s reading culture is still nothing to write home about.

He tells us more about his worry for reading, about how he started selling books, the challenges of selling books and the impact of social media on his book sales.

Till then, Maazi Okoro doesn't look like retreating on doing what he loves doing: sharing book related information with people with the view to in part motivate them to read, to buy and or to share the word - the reading gospel.

Make Zongo great again: Mahmoud Jajah's digital, entrepreneurial game plan

No matter how good a plan is, it is more often better if birthed by a person who is directly impacted by a particular situation.

One man is on a multi-pronged mission to spark the emergence of a disadvantaged neighbourhood where he was born and where he still resides.

Mahmoud Jajah was born and grew up in Nima, a Muslim dominated area notorious for social vice but also known to produce impactful citizens across the social structure.

"Insha Allah (if it is the will of God) I hope to contribute greatly to the transformation of the Zongo communities across the country. My ambition is to bequeath a transformative and resilient Zongos to this generation and the generation to come.

"I believe strongly that with the power of digital technology, we can transform the Zongos in our lifetime. I want the kind of Zongo where every young person has the opportunity to live their dreams and become whoever they want to become in this world," he told me in an interview.

What is a Zongo, inner city?

Before we delve into his digital plans, here is a classical definition of Zongo or Inner City Community - again with help and perspective of Jajah.

"There are various definitions of the word ‘Zongo’. In actual fact the word itself is a corruption of the original Hausa word ‘Zango’, which basically means a settlement or towns populated by settlers from Northern Sahel regions, especially from Northern Nigeria with the Hausa language as their common lingua franca.

"But for me as a youth development worker, my definition of Zongo means a deprived, marginalized and disadvantaged community, and not necessarily Hausa dominated communities. In other words, for me a Zongo community is a deprived community, whether Hausa dominated or not."

The digital plans of Team Jajah

He opens up on how far back his youth activism kicked off with an invitation to join one such outside his area. Then it dawned on him that his society needed one such. This was back in March 2003.

First the non-profit wings, Initiative for Youth Development, IYD, and ZongoVation Hub. The former he describes as "a youth-led organization that is committed to improving the lives of young people in deprived communities, especially in the Zongos and the three regions in the North.

And of the ZongoVation Hub, he says: "it is a community tech innovation hub that I am setting up across the various Zongo communities and the three regions in the North to serve as the hub for the training and development of tech entrepreneurs and professionals."

Jajah's belief in technology and the digital regime as the future is behind the Zongo Coders initiative that saw his outfit organize training for young people in Nima.

On the project, he had the support of the Ministry of Inner City Development and MTN Ghana Foundation. He is also partnering the International Organisation for Migration, IOM, on sensitization on illegal migration.

There is also the entrepreneurial aspect of his work. Via the ZongoPreneurs wing, he looks to build the capacity of young people to set out and enter the self-employment arena.

Jajah holds that the challenges Zongo youth faces are not entirely different from that of the average Ghanaian youth but opportunities hardly exist for his type.

"Well, I will say that our challenges are not different from challenges facing other young people. However, our peculiar challenge for me is that our youth do not have opportunities available to other youth in non-Zongo communities such as scholarship programs and job opportunities.

"The prospects look very bright. Our challenges are also opportunities, only if we re-organize our societies," he adds.

In the concluding part of this interview, we look at the main challenges he sees Zongos facing. How social media helps his work, how political parties are literally swindling the Zongo youth. We also take a peek into his life - a husband, father, and CEO. Watch this space.

13 Rabi'ul Aw'wal, 1440 = 21 November, 2018

Captain planet vs. Captain Pollution: Ghana’s plastics, Congo’s papers

Decades back, one of the famed cartoons broadcast on national television was Captain Planet, CP. As aptly stated in the theme song, CP was a hero "going to take pollution down to zero."

It wasn't all that rosy, but as always he prevailed over arch rival Captain Pollution and his allies of degradation.

The captain's allies are the planeteers, a quintuplet that could only combine their powers to "summon" him to action - almost always to save the planet.

The signature tune which so much loved to hear play started as follows: Earth, fire, wind, water, heart: gooo planet, when your powers combine, I am Captain Planet...

No cartooning in here; this piece explores how the land of my birth (Ghana, my motherland) has serially positioned itself as a self pollutant whiles my fatherland – Republic of Congo, is fairly enforcing a plastic ban as much as are other countries across Africa – Kenya, Rwanda, Eritrea etc.

I gave a brief of the 'paper – plastic packaging' dichotomy in an earlier blog post which looked at 10 pointers that put Congo ahead of Ghana.

Under the heading Paper and foil packaging vs. Ghana’s rubber and rubber, I wrote as follows – Waakye (beans and rice cooked together) is one of the main foods in Ghana so let’s use it.

If you wanted to buy waakye in Congo, it will be put in a foil nicely wrapped and put in a brown or white paper envelope. For those that buy in multiples, you will get a cloth bag for your load. Mind you waakye no dey Congo.

Our waakye equivalent is called manioc - cassava-based delicacy cooked and eaten like Ga kenkey - with grounded pepper, mayonnaise, chicken or fish plus ketchup. Chai!

Whereas in Ghana, the waakye can be in a plain olonka rubber with pepper and stew. Another rubber for macaroni and gari. All put in a black polythene then in a more colourful one. Even entering Congo with polythene, they’ll seize it, smuggle in but thy shall not be caught.

Mind you, Congo has room for some category of plastics

Make no mistake, Congo makes room for plastics. The degradable type which is sold in top supermarkets, my office uses them for rubbish collection. Where market women in Ghana will stack up polythene, in Congo it's all about brown paper envelopes and old European or Asian newspapers.

Where the marts and supermarkets will pull out branded polythene bags, well here; you get as many brown envelopes as your purchase can contain. If not, but a cotton bag for your items.

I have seen clogged gutters but not clogged because of plastics. Then again people smuggle in this same banned plastics – I know a friend who caused me so to do. The smuggled rubbers which is referred to in Ghana as 'olonka' rubber are used to tie iced water – l'eau glacier, they call it.

I have seen women who vend this iced-water bolt to go hide their water whenever they see a police vehicle approaching. That is the extent to which enforcement has gone down.

The plastics chaos in Ghana is so basic, so cheap it is nothing but terrifyingly worrying. Even buying three bags of sachet water could as well guarantee you a black polythene bag.

Give and take, every Ghanaian house would have one type of plastic packaging or the other. Flip that over, Congolese households I have seen operate with zero plastic packaging.

In all of this, knowing that the politicians will always play politics with the situation, law enforcement agencies look on helplessly and citizens, wait for the next plastics ban promise – and the countdown to the failure to implement.

The world has come to the conclusion that these plastics cause more harm than good and needs to be drastically regulated but over in Ghana, we are still wallowing, choking on these plastics from the politician to the environmental agencies and the ordinary citizens. God bless Ghana.

7 Rabi'ul Aw'wal 1440 = 15 November 2018, Thursday

LYRICS: Captain Planet Theme Track

Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart!
Go planet! By your powers combined I am Captain Planet!

Captain Planet, he's our hero,
Gonna take pollution down to zero,
He's our powers magnified,
And he's fighting on the planet side

Captain Planet, he's our hero,
Gonna take pollution down to zero,
Gonna help him put us under,
Bad guys who like to loot and plunder

"You'll pay for this Captain Planet!"

(chanting)
We're the planeteers,
You can be one too!
'Cause saving our planet is the thing to do,
Looting and polluting is not the way,
Hear what Captain Planet has to say:

"THE POWER IS YOURS!!"  

Rabi’ul Awwal: The month of Muhammad's birth, PBUH

Bismil Laah was swalaat was salaam alaa rasulul Laah! All praises and thanks is due to Allah and may HIS peace and blessings be upon the best of creation, the prophet Mohammed.

November 9, 2018; translated to the first day of Rabi’ul Awwal – the third month of the Islamic calendar. The month is sandwiched between Safar and Rabi’uth Thanee.

Aside the benefit of keenly following the Islamic dating system despite our predominant use of the Gregorian dates. It is equally important to know what underlines the names of the various months.

The most known months are those mentioned in the Qur’an, the sacred months. We know a month known for fasting, others are known for pilgrimage and so on and so forth. Note: Muharram 1440 ended with 29 days by Safar ended with 30.

The focus on this month, Rabi’ul Awwal is largely because it is according to history the month in which the Prophet -  Peace Be Upon Him, PBUH, was born. 

But how did the month derive its name? Islam Question and Answer helps us with an answer. Rabee’ al-Awwal is so called because they [Arabs] did not travel during that month (the word iritbaa,’ derived from the same root means “not traveling”)

The plural form is Arbi’aa,’ like the word naseeb (pl. ansibaa’), or Arbu’ah like the word ragheef (pl. argufah). The same maybe said concerning Rabee’ al-Aakhir as was said concerning Rabee’ al-Awwal.

READ ALSO: Hijri New Year 1440: The need to imbue, imbibe Islamic calendar

READ ALSO: Hijri vs. Gregorian calendar: Compare and contrast of "sun and moon"

The birth of Rasool in focus

Rasul was born in the Year of the Elephant. This is supported by the modern study undertaken by both Muslim and Orientalist researchers who stated that the Year of the Elephant corresponds to the year 570 CE or 571 CE.

With regard to the day, he, PBUH, was born on a Monday, his mission began on a Monday and he died on a Monday. Narrated by Abu Qataadah al-Ansaari, RA, the prophet, PBUH, was asked about fasting on Mondays and he said:

“That is the day on which I was born and on it my mission began – or revelation came to me.” The twelfth is the most authentic of narrations with respect to the exact date of birth, according to scholars and Allah knows best.

Ok, now to the issue of the birth of the prophet PBUH which is widely reported to have happened on 12th of Rabi’ul Awwal. It indeed means different things to different people.

Those that will celebrate a ‘mawlid,’ good luck, those that won’t – abeg no wahala. I belong to the school of thought that advocates that we live and let live. We are united on the love of Abal Qaasim, let’s leave it at that.

The genesis of the names: Muharram and Safar

Since we have crossed into Muharram and Safar, I suppose telling how they got their names won’t be a bad idea.

Shaykh ‘Alam ad-Deen as-Sakhaawi stated in a book that he compiled, entitled al-Mashhoor fi Asma’ al-Ayyaam wa’sh-Shuhoor, that Muharram is so called because it is a sacred (muharram) month.

I think that it was so called to affirm its sanctity, because the Arabs used to change it, making it not sacred one year and making it sacred another year. He said: The plural form of Muharram is Muharramaat or Mahaarim or Mahaareem.

Safar is so called because their houses would be devoid of them when they went out to fight or to travel, and it would be said “safira al-makaan (the place has become empty)” when people left. The plural form of Safar is Asfaar.

Was swalaat was salaam alaa Rasulul Laah!

Rabi'ul Aw'wal 1, 1440 = November 9, 2018