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By Dada Ahmed in Lokoja.
Alhaji Tanimu Abdullahi on top of his tricycle,ready for business.
A 52- year-old man living with disability, Alhaji Tanimu Baba Abdullahi, with special needs, who became cripple at the age of seven says he has defeated disability by engaging in transportation business to earn a living.
Abdullahi, who revealed this to the Correspondent of The Reporters in Lokoja on Wednesday in an interview said he earned up to N5,000 daily, depending on the business climate of the day.
According to him he drives his tricycle to carry goods and services across the nooks and crannies of Lokoja and its environs.
He said he refused disability to kill his ability by obtaining his ordinary GCE level school certificate, learnt shoemaking, engaged in sports(table tennis) and presently, into transport business to fend for himself and his family.
Abdullahi,who displayed five of the laurels he won in table tennis from various sports festivals in the country said:”Though as a man with disability, I hate begging because it is debasing.
“Some members of the public present fetish things to beggars, pretending to be magnanimous where as they have devilish intention.
“Disability is not an excuse for PwDs to indulge in begging for alms, because experience shows that we have ability in disability.
“All we need to do is to demonstrate this in practical terms.”
Abdullahi, who is married with three children, aged between 18 and 10 and lives in his apartment, said he was given the title of “Sarkin Guragus”( leader of people with disabilities) in Lokoja because of his dugged determination to make it in life through hard work and resilence, despite his condition.
The PwD member,, who disclosed that he began transport business many years ago in Lokoja, however, conveying cows, beansrice among others,expressed concern that the society does not recognize PwDs as persons who could make it in life.
” In many cases, customers hire my service with lower price, erroneously believing that I would not be able to measure up to the standard of the abled-bodied counterparts in delivering the service.
” I have no option but accept the price,if I must earn a living but that shows the negative perception of the society against members of PwDs which need to be changed ”
He noted that much as he and many of his colleagues in the world of disability would have loved to meet the Governor of the state, Alhaji Yahaha Bello, to present their problems to him,”being a nice man”,the bureaucracy made that impossible.
He called on his colleagues to stop bemoaning over their condition and take their cross by engaging in meaningful means to live worthy life like their abled-bodied ones in the society.
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