45 Canoe Mishap: Touching tale of late ‘king of paddling’
Rakiya A. Muhammad, Sokoto
There was no foreboding of the tragedy that lurked in the shadows. But disaster was soon to strike, claiming 30-year-old canoe operator Usman Manu at Doruwa Village Shagrai local government area of Sokoto State, his four passengers Fadimatu Galadima (46), her two children 11-year- old Muhammad and six-weekold Usman as well as a teenager Maryam Abdullah.
The five persons lost their lives in a canoe mishap on Friday January 5, 2018.
It was barely a year and half after Usman abandoned his cattle rearing and farming businesses for canoe transport.
Some of Usman’s friends recall that on the night before he died, he had joked and laughed with them throughout the time they were together at their meeting point.
Daily Trust learnt that when one of the friends addressed him as Sarkin Jirgi (King of Paddling), he responded that the day he would have an accident, it may also cost him his life and it turned out to be so.
An air of deep melancholy surrounded Hauwau Usman, the paddler’s wife, as she speaks on the devastating incident: “My husband woke up early that fateful day to honour an appointment with a passenger who wanted to be ferried across to Bela Village as early as 7am. That was the last I saw of him until the news of the accident came to us around 10am.”
“He was such a loving, caring and humble personality,” she says of her spouse of 15 years. “He was always striving to make life easy for me, his mother, and our seven children,” the grief-stricken widow reveals.
Usman’s 75-year-old mother Yar’ Giwa was the one who woke her son up to prepare for his trip to Bela.
She said: “I woke him up early so that he can take a customer to Bela because he had promised the man a day earlier. I didn’t notice when he left the house. He didn’t even bid me farewell.”
The grieving mother attested to her son’s caring and pleasant nature. “He always brought us happiness. He was planning to marry a second wife and the room he proposed to keep her has been completed.”
It was also a devastating moment for the family that lost three members in the ill-fated journey. Fadimatu, whose two children died with her, was on her way to her elder brother’s residence in Shagari from Bela. She was accompanying her 11-year-old son Muhammad back to school after the vacation. Muhammad was staying with his uncle’s family.
Fadimatu’s elder brother, Alhaji Sabo Muhammad Dan Galadima, said his sister was going to Shagari to bring back her son who was to resume school. Her son Muhammad was in class 4, he adds.
“Fatima was an obedient, patient, disciplined and respectful woman. She was a good wife, daughter and sister,” the gloomy brother states.
He recalled: “It is exactly two weeks since her last visit to my family. During the visit, our mother prayed so much for her as a good child.”
The toddler whom late Fatima was backing at the time of the incident was said to have died from cold, as he did not drown like the other four victims. A witness said that the baby was rescued alive but died before they got to shore.
For late Maryam Abdullah, the teenager who also died in the mishap, she was identified as a milkmaid at Doruwa village.
The village Head of Doruwa, Alhaji Shehu Dan Modo (Dan Jekan Doruwa) described the canoe operator Usman as easy-going and respectful.
He explained that the canoe mishap occurred at about 10 am but they had to delay the search for the corpses until after Jumaat prayer. “By the time the corpses were retrieved, it was after 6.30 pm,” he recalled.
He lamented the several lives lost every year following canoe mishaps.
“The earth dam water rather than contribute to our agricultural development end up killing our people almost every day especially during the harmattan,” he reveals.
He appealed to relevant authorities to find a way of decongesting the huge volume of water which he observes, frequently spills over from the earth dam and devastates their farms, houses and result in loss of lives.