From Zogoes to Heroes

A day after the news came out that the young man Joseph Fahnbulleh, based in the United States of America (USA) was now in the finals of the 200 meters race at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics in Japan, I wrote a Commentary about how the youthful Fahnbulleh decided to run in the Olympics as a Liberian and gave up millions of United States dollars by not competing as a USA citizen. 

Since I wrote my Commentary, a day after the news broke out, about the honesty of young Emmanuel Tuloe, who found a bag with USD50,000 and LD100,000 in it and returned it to the rightful owner, the news about his honesty has spread so widely at home and abroad.

These Commentaries were written to encourage Liberians, especially young Liberians, to be patriotic and honest and not be money-driven or greed-driven. I am now encouraged to write this Commentary about Zogoes who have become heroes and heroines, like the heroes Fahnbulleh and Tuloe.

With longstanding and widespread poverty being the main societal problem in Liberia, it is most important to do something to encourage poor people, like the zogoes, to be hopeful about their getting out of poverty. 

This Commentary is about how young poor people, called zogoes, and how they can get out of poverty to become heroes and heroines. No name is being called here because name-calling is not necessary. Two stories are presented below.

A zogo lost his parents at a very young age and began to sleep in the streets because he had no house to sleep in. He begged for food and sometimes took things that he needed from garbage dumps.

One day, he saw a boy cutting grass in somebody's yard and another boy washing somebody's car. So, he began to go around trying to get some money from cutting grass and washing cars. While cutting grass at a school compound, one of the teachers saw him and encouraged him to attend school through the teacher's sponsorship. 

Zogo began attending school and he finished high school with good grades. So, a university gave him a scholarship and he earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture. This zogo joined a group of farmers to buy a rice mill and today he is producing and selling rice, Liberian rice, of high quality with no rocks and sand to speak of. Today, this boy who was mocked and called a zogo, is now a man with family and house while helping poor young people called zogoes to change their lives for the better.

The other story about a zogo has to do with a girl whose parents were killed during the Liberian Civil War. One of the rebel commanders sexually abused her and left her out in the street to die. But an elderly woman in the community saw her and took her home to be with the family and get into better health. 

This zogo, seeing that the elderly woman was helping her, began to sell some food given to her by the woman. From the food sales, this zogo was able to go to school. She made good grades in school and that earned her a scholarship to go to a university upon graduating from high school. Today, this zogo is a Medical Doctor, working mainly on children to keep them healthy.

There are many untold stories of zogoes who have done well and have become good citizens of Liberia, setting good examples for others to follow. These examples show that there are some people called zogoes who are rich spiritually but poor materially. 

Just like the patriotic and honest Joseph Fahnbulleh and Emmanuel Tuloe, who are poor materially but their spiritual richness led them to take patriotic and honest actions that continue to receive local and global praises. Clearly, honesty comes from spirituality and makes a person a hero or a heroine while dishonesty comes from materiality and makes a person dishonorable.

One of my friends, the late Francis Dunbar, helped me a lot to understand zogoes. Brother Francis showed me the outdoor places where about the over fifty thousand zogoes in Monrovia lived and had become drug addicts. 

Some of these zogoes were even going to graveyards, taking human parts, mainly bones, and mixing them with cocaine to get "high". Brother Francis did very well arranged for food at least twice a month for thousands of zogoes and encouraged them not to give up hope because there are some persons who care about them. Brother Francis was successful in encouraging many zogoes to go to school and become income earners.

Encouraged by the work of Brother Francis, we of Susukuu, the fifty-year-old poverty alleviation NGO, went to Nimba County to launch the Campaign to begin calling the disabled Physically Challenged.  This Campaign remains necessary because people who are called "abled" have not won a single Africa Football Cup while the people who are wrongly called "disabled" have won two Africa Football Cups in succession or any at all. 

So, who really are the disabled? Let us do the right thing by calling persons without limbs and without sight or hearing Physically Challenged rather than disabled. Similarly. We must stop calling the unemployed youth in the streets zogoes because this does not show respect and as all human beings are created equal, we must show these young people respect through calling them by their personal names, which they have, or referring to them collectively as unemployed youth.

Fortunately, most Liberians are not mocking these young people because at least 80 percent of Liberians think that Liberia is headed in the wrong direction (Afrobarometer, 2020).

 We can get Liberia to move in the right direction by people who love Liberia working together to share knowledge that treats All People equally to motivate voters to change the UNFAIR electoral system and make it FAIR so that good persons can get elected to take good actions through the Rule of Law to bring Justice for All, the only ingredient for lasting Peace and Better Living Conditions in Liberia.