The women stone breakers of Plateau
Sitting on a rock with a stone sledge hammer in one hand and coughing profusely, 61yearold Mary Yakubu gently used the edge of her wrapper to wipe her face in an attempt to remove the speck of dust that was making her eyes uncomfortable.
Once successful and feeling satisfied, the mother of eight squinted both eyes to avoid the scourging Friday afternoon sun and continued her laborious work of breaking large stones into tiny pieces.
At the Sabon Garin Tudun Wada quarry, opposite St. Moses Catholic Church in Jos North local government area of Plateau State, Mary and other elderly women subject themselves to the vigorous and tough process of breaking huge chunk of rocks into smaller pieces.
Manual stone breaking no matter how tasking and exasperating has become a prevalent business in Plateau State owing to the abundance of hilly rocks in the state. Such rocks are used for various purposes especially in construction.
As laborious as the task is, it is most commonly done by women and mostly it is the elderly that have found dwelling in it for many years.
Regardless of the vigour it requires, the financial gain is often very minimal and the sales are not often brisk. Worst still, the women suffer from body pain, catarrh and cough, eye problems and physical injury among others. But they are not deterred.
Mary Yakubu, who was the only woman wearing rubber boots to protect her legs, said the doggedness of the Plateau women made it possible to find them exceeding and even dominating jobs that are originally perceived as more male friendly.
“At 61, this is my 10th year doing this work and there are many other women who are much older than me engaged in stone breaking.
``I am doing this to feed my family because my children and husband are not working. I trained my children to school but I didn’t have money to train all of them to go further. Two of them went to the university but still they are not employed,” she said.
While chatting with other women at the query,
who expressed their displeasure with the media who only come to bother them with questions and no financial aid, Daily Trust observed that the stones are usually supplied to the women after being blasted from rocky hills elsewhere.
They are then loaded in large chunks into lorries and brought to the women who now set out the task of separating them into various sizes before further breaking them into tiny bits.
“The dealers sell the stones per lorry at N15, 000 or N17, 000 depending on the type of stones and how you bargain. We then use hammers to break them into different pieces, after which they are packed in sacks and displayed by the road side to be sold at N300 per bag,” she explained.
With many mouths to feed and a very weak and old husband at home, Mary, the only bread winner in the house could not give an estimate of the profit she makes but explained that, “at least I have the turnover which I use to keep purchasing the stones but I can’t say I earn a particular profit because we use part of the money for our daily needs.”
Less than four kilometres from Mary’s quarry is 63 year-old Hannatu Abari Yakubu who sits under an umbrella, a precaution she often takes to protect her from the sun.
At the popular Domkat Bali quarry, Hannatu, a mother of four surviving children has been into stone breaking for over 20 years and said though not very profitable, it is her only source of livelihood.
“Sometimes, it takes up to two months for a lorry load of stones purchased to be broken into pieces and packaged. The highest gain you can make from a lorry is N4, 000 despite our labour and other things. But I use the little gain from the work to manage my life and train my children in school.”
She is, however, also coughing and said she been coughing for a long time.
“There are lots of ailments associated with this our work. But that doesn’t deter me from doing the work because if I stop it, how do I feed. Even as I speak to you, I am feeling back ache and funny too, if I decide to rest for a day or two, the pain becomes more intense so it is better to keep working since I take paracetamol and other pain killers for the body ache.”
“For the past three months, my left eye has been aching because a stone particle hit me directly in the eye while working. Initially, my vision was impaired but it is getting better because I had to go to the hospital for treatment. But despite the hazards, this is not something I can just leave,” she narrated.
Hannatu said she often suffers from headache and is almost certain that her cough is due to constant exposure to the dust particles that comes from breaking stones.
Her assessment of the health effect is buttressed by a Senior Resident Pulmonologist with the Jos University Teaching Hospital (JUTH), Dr. Ijeoma Nwakakwa, who said crystalline silica which is the most common airborne dust that miners and quarry-workers