Insightful businessman, Azeem Baksh is a ‘Special Person’

Dec 16, 2018 Features / Columnists, News, Special Person

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“You need to work hard and you need to save; you have got to know what your goal is and work towards it. Without knowing what your goal is, what are you going to achieve?”

By Sharmain Grainger

“Without God we are nothing!” Azeem Baksh has lived by this motto for the most part of his life and today we share his story of just how he was able to overcome a plethora of challenges to become the successful businessman he is today.
Quoting Dr. Balamurali Ambati, an Indian-American Ophthalmologist who was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records when he became the youngest doctor at the age of 17, Baksh said, “To the youths of the world – work hard while you are young, so that you can enjoy it as you get older.” Indeed Baksh is a sterling example of this very notion spoken of a few years ago by the young scholar.

But Baksh had long before this recognised that it is imperative to work hard and be focused if you are to have a successful life. In fact he believes that young people should learn from an early age that it is important “to associate with the right people and make smart choices.”
He added, “You need to work hard and you need to save; you have got to know what your goal is and work towards it. Without knowing what your goal is, what are you going to achieve?”
Even as he made the point that realising one’s goal will entail making a few, or even many sacrifices sometimes, Baksh noted that people, especially young people, must be au fait with the fact that “whatever you work hard for comes from God. So you have to be prayerful; by ourselves we are nothing, but with God we are everything.”
Although advanced in age, today Baksh is a versatile businessman who currently enjoys gold mining, even as he engages in some exploration work. But venturing into such activities these days is not merely to turn a profit, rather, these are among his favourite pastimes.
You see, Baksh was able to make it successful as a businessman so many years ago that he has been known to help thousands of small miners chart successful mining operations. His many business ventures have been known to be very kind to the local economy over the years.

But business wasn’t always a walk in the park for Baksh. In fact, there were many points of his life when he was almost consumed by so many challenges that he simply couldn’t see his way.

FORMATIVE YEARS
Born February 16, 1954, to parents Hassim and Shamiun Nesha Baksh [both deceased], he was the eldest child in the 10-children household.
He recalls growing up with the nickname ‘Joe’ but doesn’t really remember how come. But it might have been his parents who started the deed.
“I don’t remember how I got it, but even today that name stick….a lot of people still call me ‘Joe’ Baksh instead of my real name,” said a smiling Baksh, as he reflected on his past. He, however, added, “When I hear that name I know is somebody who was very close and somebody I know from way back.”
Way back for Baksh was in a community called Caledonia on the island of Wakenaam. Wakenaam is an island of about 17.5 square miles or [45 square kilometres] situated at the mouth of the Essequibo River. Baksh recalled it being a rice and coconut farming community back in the day. He learned to drive a tractor in the backdam at a young age which was normal for a young Wakenaam boy. It was normal too for young boys on the island to be very entrepreneurial-minded.
“We used to climb coconut trees, pick the coconuts, peel the coconuts, grate them and make coconut oil and sell. We used to pick the branches, strip them, and make pointer brooms and sell those too…we used to catch shrimps and sell and even cut grass for people to help the parents,” Baksh recounted. All this he was doing while still at the level of primary school.

He attended the Zeelandia Primary School located right on the island.
“In a day we would walk a mile to go to school and a mile back home for lunch to eat milk and rice and another mile to go back to school and another back home after,” Baksh recounted as he burst into laughter.
“We used to walk bare feet on a dusty road every day to go to school,” he remembered.
After sitting Common Entrance, he passed to attend Tutorial High School located in Georgetown. But in order to attend that school in the capital city, he was afforded accommodation at a relative’s home at Hague Front, West Coast Demerara. He recalled learning to take the train at Hague Backdam, which took him to Vreed en Hoop, where he crossed over to Georgetown by steamer.

AMBITIOUS VISION
An outstanding academic performer, Baksh even then had the confidence that he had the potential to delve into just about any career path he set his mind to and emerge successful.
“I wanted to do law, so I wanted to go to England to study, but my father wanted me to become a doctor, so he wanted me to study medicine instead, but I was never interested in that,” said Baksh, as he recalled how his dream to become a doctor eventually died a natural death, as did talk about him becoming a doctor and even a pilot, which he’d toyed with for a while.
Instead of utilising his GCE subjects to pursue studies in the mainstream professional fields, Baksh, a rebel at the time, opted to vie for a barman position which was being advertised by the then Carib Hotel situated at Liliendaal, Greater Georgetown.
In fact, he was able to outmatch more than 30 young men who were also vying for the job.
“It was difficult; I was among 38 young men lined up for that job. In those days when you go job-hunting the first thing you use to do was go to Stabroek News, because they used to put out a paper with these vacancy ads outside. So when you got your GCE you were off job-hunting,” Baksh recalled.
It wasn’t easy to go job-hunting too, Baksh disclosed even as he remembered the occasions when he didn’t even have the 10 cents required to travel by the yellow bus, which was a common mode of transportation around Georgetown.
Back in those days, Baksh remembered that it was the government jobs that paid the best salaries, thus they were the most sought after. The closest he would come to one of those, at the time, was when he landed a job with a government contractor.
“I was driving a tractor for him…GCE subjects didn’t mean anything, it was knowing to drive a tractor; that tractor licence helped me to get that job,” recounted Baksh.
However, when he learnt that a barman position was being advertised, Baksh said that he jumped at the opportunity. But a barman those days, he explained, didn’t merely pour drinks and collect the dollars, rather, they had to learn proper etiquette, which must become second nature to any service provider. “You had to be trained for this job, so you got on the job training…” he recalled.
Little did Baksh know that this point of his life was merely the start of a very eventful existence. You see, by the time he had gotten the hang of his job, Baksh became smitten by a young woman who encouraged him to travel with her to Aruka River in the North West District.
For Baksh, taking this path was all about the intrigue and adventure.

“That was something else…we were on a steamer whole day and whole night and can’t reach to where we were going. We eventually reached Morawhanna first, then the second stop, Kumaka Stelling, was the turn back point, and from there you had to join a boat to go a good way up to the Aruka River,” Baksh shared.
But with the arrival at the destination came the thought that he might have just happened upon a world which was yet to embrace modern civilisation. It was a locale where farming yam, corn, ginger, sweet potato and such produce was the way of life.
“There was no electricity! It was so very different to what I was used to…I wanted to get away and go back home,” Baksh confessed. It might have been the fault of the alluring young woman, who persuaded him to travel to Aruka River in the first place, but Baksh decided to stay much longer than he’d intended upon arrival. Moreover, the next phase of his North West District adventure was to find a job that could sustain him. At this point he was sure that he couldn’t return to Georgetown to claim back his barman job.
He could have easily become the teacher at the catholic school in the area, but refused that offer, since it meant him converting to Christianity. This might have been due to the fact that his life was already overwhelmed with religion, since his father was a Muslim and his mother a Hindu.
“I grew up learning about the Hindu and Muslim way of life, but I had to adopt my father’s religion, so I was a Muslim and I didn’t want to change my religion just for a job,” Baksh noted.
His continued search for a job took him to Matthew’s Ridge where he recalled the income-earning focus was being shifted from manganese to agriculture. He was able to qualify for a job at the Government Experimental Station, where experiments were carried out to ascertain which produce would be more feasible to grow. Baksh was later transferred to the Citrus Nursery Station where he was tasked with a great deal of budding and grafting.
But since Matthew’s Ridge simply couldn’t hold this young man down, he headed back to Aruka River where he caressed the possibility of buying the produce yielded there and transporting them for resale in Georgetown.
Embracing this venture might have been the first time in his adult life that Baksh gained a real appreciation for being an entrepreneur. It was much different from when his father attempted to induct him into the business of rice farming years earlier.
He was beginning to take the reins of his life and being at the helm of a thriving business was his vision.
But things didn’t go quite the way he planned. He recalled being wrongfully accused of rape and being sentenced to serve a two-year jail term. It could have been the end of his world, but instead that daunting experience opened a portal to a completely different life. He recalled a fellow inmate exposing him to Christianity which, from the confines of his cell, seemed to give all the answers he needed to live a fulfilling life. This naturally was a turning point in his life.

A NEW PATH
After serving his time, Baksh emerged a ‘new man’ taking up residence initially at a friend’s place at Bonasika, East Bank Essequibo. “I became a Christian and life changed for me…there were miracles after miracles happening in my life,” Baksh recalled.
This, however, did not mean that his life was a ‘bed of roses’. To ensure he had a steady income meant doing farm work and even digging drains sometimes. There were times he wasn’t even paid when he completed a job. Baksh was nevertheless ambitious and driven enough to dare envisage a future where the tide would turn in his favour.

While farming in Bonasika had the potential to be lucrative, circumstances caused Baksh to abandon such a venture and seek employment as a store keeper with a sawmilling company at Orangestein, East Bank Essequibo where he’d relocate. But this certainly couldn’t have been the ultimate career goal, especially for Baksh, who had already conceptualised a future for himself that didn’t include him working 12-hour shifts for an employer.
By this time too, Baksh was a father and was driven to increase his earnings. He moved on to Cow Island to work as a boat dispatcher.
“Things were much better there, but a lot of dishonest things used to go on and I couldn’t have continued there,” recalled Baksh, whose next move was to head to Skull Point in the Cuyuni-Mazaruni region, where he worked with yet another sawmilling company as a Checker. “With the Checker work you couldn’t get double-shift and with the single shift you could hardly buy food to eat, much less do anything else,” recalled Baksh. Things had gotten so bad financially that he requested a demotion to become a labourer just so he could benefit from the double-shift pay, even if this meant losing the living facilities perks that came with the Checker job.
“Some of the guys used to laugh at me after I asked for that demotion but I was focused…I didn’t want to be stuck there for the rest of my life,” Baksh shared.
But one day Baksh, still in his 20s, had an epiphany of the course his life was destined to take. He observed a boat arriving on Sunday mornings laden with fruits and fish which, he recalled, would be sold out “in a jiffy”. Indulging in such an affair would see him travelling to Bartica to make the necessary purchases and then returning to sell. He first started with the fruits and then expanded to include fish. Since this venture did not mesh well with his labourer job, Baksh decided to quit that and take on a job as a night-shift security guard. He was not only able to live off of his earnings but even save a little too.
But there were those who, from their actions, envied his evident success and attempted to foil same. Instead of being discouraged, Baksh simply took this as a sign to again move on. He headed to Bartica to regroup and start over. It was a difficult task to find a place to rent, but as fate would have it, he was offered temporary accommodation before he was eventually able to find a place to rent.
With Bartica being the gateway to the country’s mining locale, Baksh was understandably enticed to venture there. He ended up at a place called Tumatumari and was quickly making a mental note of the needs there. Among them were products such as cigarettes, radio batteries, torchlights and whizz. With a savings of $200, Baksh decided to invest in helping to offset the scarcity of these items. The buying and selling venture he embraced was quite lucrative, but what Baksh didn’t know was that he couldn’t engage in such a venture without the necessary permit. He learnt the hard way when he was taken into police custody.
But it was after being released that he would have the biggest break of his life. Not only did he gain his first bona fide client to resell products in Tumatumari, but he was offered an apology for the treatment meted out to him by the police force. His client was the coordinator for the ruling party of the day, and incidentally owned a shop that required all, and even more, of the items Baksh was willing to buy and sell.

ULTIMATE SUCCESS
Business started to take off and grew even more when one client multiplied into several in what seemed like overnight. He moved from travelling by truck along a lonely trail to flying the friendly skies in a plane to ensure that the needed merchandise reached his clients.
But there were even more opportunities than merely buying and selling goods – he was after all in the gold mining region, to which many headed to unlock a brighter future for themselves and family. This became pellucid to Baksh when he learnt to appreciate being paid in gold rather than in cash. And since being a visionary came natural to him, he was soon devising a plan to get into mining too.
So successful he became, that Baksh was able to purchase many properties in Bartica which was really beginning to thrive because of gold mining activities.
“I started building shops in Bartica, in Mahdia, and I started to buy properties there and in Bartica too…things were really looking up,” Baksh recalled.
He did not keep his success to himself, but rather, brought on board one of his younger brothers too. He was living the life of a king and was even able to build his dream home in Bartica. But this father of seven – Amanda, Anita, Azeem Junior, Deborah, Angela, Jonathan and Vashti – decided to make a radical change in his life when his youngest child [Vashti], who was barely one-year old at the time, became sick with malaria, even unto the brink of death. This saw him upping and relocating his family to Georgetown. Although his move was unplanned, it certainly did not hamper the success of this business mogul.
Currently a resident of Station Street, Kitty, Georgetown, Baksh is still a successful businessman who is always willing to share his knowledge with just about anyone who will listen. He has long come to recognise too that in addition to help from God and a focused vision, the support of his ever-loving wife, Indra, has played a monumental role in helping him to become the outstanding entrepreneur he is today.
“My family has always been supportive, especially my wife, she is the backbone of it all…she is the best woman in this world for me,” said Baksh of his wife, even as he stressed the importance of always recognising and appreciating support wherever it is offered.
Our choice for ‘Special Person’ today is also an ardent advocate for Guyanese to be more patriotic and see the importance of being loving and respectful to each other, traits he had long found to be very valuable in every aspect of life.

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