I’m no miser, says man who buries his money
He roamed aimlessly about the place without uttering a word to anyone, so the foreman at the site reasoned that the grey-haired man wanted to be hired. “But I can’t employ him because he is frail,” said our master, recalled one of the workmen, Muhammad Auwal. “I will give him alms instead.” He was given […]
He roamed aimlessly about the place without uttering a word to anyone, so the foreman at the site reasoned that the grey-haired man wanted to be hired. “But I can’t employ him because he is frail,” said our master, recalled one of the workmen, Muhammad Auwal. “I will give him alms instead.” He was given N50, which he pocketed and left. “But he returned after about 30 minutes, went round the place and left again,” Auwal narrated.
“When it was around 1pm, the old man came back in the company of another person. We did not say anything, but kept an eye on them,” Auwal said, adding: “Then he led the other man to a spot at the base of a rock and quickly started digging with knife. So we went and surrounded him as he unearthed a plastic container wrapped in a polythene bag. After removing layers of bags, he brought out many N1,000 notes.”
Auwal explained how Gajere went on to exhume money from two more spots, before telling them that he was away in Niger Republic when work started on the area and how on noticing the development on his return a day earlier, he rushed to extricate his life savings. Weekly Trust learnt that the plot of land had been left fallow for decades by its owners and was always covered with bushes.
Shortly after the drama on said Friday, Weekly Trust successfully located the man’s abode about 200 metres from the site. It was said that he had gone for his night watch duty, but his brother, Muhammadu Salisu, explained the reasons for the former’s action. “Whenever he receives salary, he wraps it in folds of polythene bags, inserts it into a plastic container to bury. If you ask him where his money is, he will say he has settled debts with it. And he’d repeat the same when the next salary is paid.”
But for Gajere to be able to feed and meet other sundry needs, he goes out, after every night shift, to beg on the streets. His brother told Weekly Trust: “If you go to Kingsway or Leventis or Central Hotel in the afternoon, you are sure of seeing him clutching a bowl and seeking alms.”
Salisu recalled how his brother came to him in the morning with the news of the unusual activity at his ‘bank’. “This time around, he asked me to go with him to remove the money before the workers tampered with it.”
Gajere, according to his brother, was so apprehensive of the presence of one of their relations who accompanied them to the site for a second digging, that he pretended the remaining money had been stolen.
On learning that another expedition was scheduled for the next day, Weekly Trust waited to see Gajere in action. Just at about few minutes to 4pm on said day, Salisu and Gajere appeared at the spot, with a hoe hanging on Salisu’s shoulders. Gajere has a look of a malnourished person as his brother had earlier described him.
With all his tricks, however, Gajere gave up the search when workers told him that the particular site he was concentrating on had already had its top soil excavated and sand-filled into a gully. One of the workers even said something about some polythene bags containing what looked like charms and amulets thrown into the bottom of the filled ditch.
But when asked if he is a miser and ungenerous even to himself, he answered thus: “Don’t take what people tell you about me for the truth. I don’t bury money because I don’t want to eat, but because of my recent experience with robbers. I was trailed by three armed robbers to an isolated place after I brought out a large sum of money and shopped. They beat me up and took away all the money.”
But one thing he did not dispute is scrounging. “Of course I beg. The fact that I own a herd of cattle will not stop me from begging. To say the truth, I beg for alms even in my village,” he said.