Alex Okosi: MAMAs reframed Africa’s narrative

Since it first took place in 2008, the awards come to seen as one of the most important ceremonies for the African music industry.

“Launching [the award] has in a lot of ways reframed the narrative of Africa,” Okosi said in an interview with Business Day. “We were ambitious to do the first one in Nigeria. The first one was in Abuja and while it was a challenging event, yet, I woke up the next morning to see Kelly Rowland and Dbanj as part of the collaboration on the front page of CNN website, that was a great story for Africa.”

Five years after the first edition of the MAMAs took place, Viacom established the MTV Base Africa television station. According to Okosi, the idea was not only to show African music videos. "When we launched MTV Base, the mission was to show great quality content that wasn’t being done before. It was always a passion in my heart as a young African American, to get the world to see Africa beyond what was usually being projected at that time which was basically boom and doom.”

Speaking about the delivery of quality work by MTV Base, Okosi said that Viacom took important steps to improve music video quality

“We realised that if the musician can create quality music and video, the artist would go far. We did the research in Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Senegal at that time and the research showed that quality was the barrier,” he said.

“We decided to do workshops where we brought quality producers from around the world and we did not want to call it a Masterclass because it would sound condescending, so we organised a skills exchange workshop and through this workshop, we created like 20 music videos in two years with Ghana, Gabon, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and we found out that once we established an industry where they now knew each other and content became better, the quality started to rise.”

The inaugural MAMAs was held in Nigeria’s capital city Abuja and was hosted by the British DJ Trevor Nelson. It has since been gone around the continent, stopping over in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Durban. Last year the event failed to take place, an absence which Okosi said was due to Viacom “working to reinvent the MAMAs to create a deeper music experience that will be more immersive for our fans and partners in 2018”.

The event is expected to take place later this year.