Meet Plateau boy who built ‘tractor’
From Lami Sadiq, Jos
At 23, Jerry Isaac Mallo has made a statement with the various machines he fabricated. Against all odds, including opposition from many people, including his parents, Mallo has earned a lot of fame and respect in Plateau State as one of the youngest and most impactful inventors presently. At an early age, he always scouted for scraps with which to build things. He turned the store in his parents’ house into a junkyard, which he called his workshop. When given money to replace worn-out slippers or shoes, Jerry would instead buy a spanner or any hand tool he needed in his workshop and continue managing his worn-out shoes.
He subjected his mother to the stress of always throwing out many of the scraps he gathered around the house. At any given opportunity, Mallo unscrewed his father’s television, radio and other gadgets and re-coupled them. But he didn’t escape his father’s cane.
His father, Isaac Buwah Mallo said, “When I asked him to sit down and read his books he would not; he always wanted to gather scraps, which he used in constructing machines. Because of this, I used to flog him a lot as a child.”
With parents who were civil servants and farmers, all Jerry Mallo could think of at a young age was how to simplify and speed up his portion of the farm work so he could have enough time to work when he retired to his workshop. There, he experimented on several mechanical gadgets, starting from prototype toy cars to several agricultural machines. His latest invention is a farming tractor, a feat which impressed many people, including Vice President Yemi Osinbajo during Plateau’s micro, small and medium enterprises clinic in May 2017.
Already, Mallo has developed agricultural machines such as maize threshers, rice husking machine, fonio (acha) blending machine, multiple milling machines, dryers for tomatoes and more. Soon after secondary school, he also fabricated and rode a car, using wood and rods. Lately, he produced a functional tractor, which has been displayed at various medium and small scale enterprises exhibitions in Jos and Abuja.
But getting to this point was not easy for the 23-year-old boy, who was born and bred in the farming village of Kunet in Bokkos Local Government Area of Plateau State. He did not allow the lack of electricity in the community, a lot of armed robbery activities, and the fact that his parents needed his contributions in the farm, to discourage him. “I grew up doing a lot of farm work, and we did it manually, but that did not discourage me,” he said.
His family farmed Irish potatoes, maize and soya beans, so while in primary school, Mallo thought of a machine that could save him time and reduce the farm stress. “We used to thresh the maize manually, putting them in sacks and beating it with sticks. I used to think of how to invent a machine that would do a five-day job in one day so that I could focus on my engineering work. I made the first maize threshing machine while I was in JSS2.”
Some of the materials for the machine were sourced from the junkyard, and with his little savings from farming, Mallo came up with the sum of N20,000, with which he made the maize thresher.
“That was my first useful invention. As a child I made a lot of battery-powered toys like prototype cars with wires and zincs. I made the first one when I was probably in primary 3 or 4,” he said.
Everyone knew that Mallo was talented. While in secondary school, he met a friend he calls Madu, an equally passionate inventor, and they developed a generator that worked without