Forty-five-year-old Sunday Tijani has been a cripple for over four decades, seriously hampered and unable to freely move around like his friends and other relations.
But this debilitating disability has not dissuaded or discouraged Tijani, who resides at 56, Ago Egun area of Abeokuta, Ogun State, from aspiring to live an independent life and be successful like the average able-bodied men.
From childhood, after being hit by measles, which since then resulted in the loss of the strength in his two legs, he had been determined to live a normal life.
When it was time for Tijani to raise a family, he sought and got a wife, but not without opposition from certain quarters.
Efforts were made by some people to discourage his-wife-to-be from going ahead with the plans to get hooked to her physically challenged husband.
Her relations and friends tried unsuccessfully to make her see reason why she should forget the idea of going into marriage with a cripple, but she stood her ground and went ahead to get married to her heartthrob.
Today, the unusual couple have seven able-bodied children.
ife and children. We have given birth to seven children; my wife is not disabled like me. She is perfectly okay, and getting married to her was God’s plan for my life.
“Although she had been married to someone else before I met her, since we got married, she has never referred to my disability whenever we have any quarrel.
Even when she was planning to marry me, people were telling her all sorts of things, that she should not marry me because of my condition, but she never listened to them. I will say it again, because I believe my marriage to her was God’s plan”.
How does he now cater for this large number of family members, especially with his physical challenge?
“If I had not learned a skill or have nothing doing for livelihood, then I would have been on the streets as a beggar, begging for alms to take care of my family or begging because of hunger. “God is providing me what I need.
I know how much I spend daily on my family.
So, when one has a livelihood, what else is he looking for that he will go and beg on the streets?” he added.
According to him, his disability has never affected his embroidery work in any negative way. Rather, Tijani said that he had been taking care of his family with the proceed from his work without any stress, because God had also blessed him with a caring and understanding wife.
“My work never seems stressful to me, because I spent almost four years learning it. If I had not learnt the job, then I would have been having some problems,” he said.
He’s, however, grateful to his parents for insisting that he learnt a trade while growing up, inspite of his physical challenge.
Shortly after his primary education at the First Baptist Primary School, Ijaiye, Abeokuta, Ogun State, his parents enrolled him in the shop of a master to learn embroidery so that he would be able to fend for himself later in life and even raise his own family.
“I do embroidery on clothes. It was my father and my mother who made sure that I learnt embroidery work, which I started in 1988 and I did my freedom in 1991. They (my parents) told me firmly that that was the work I must learn,” he said.
Explaining the cause of his permanent disability, Tijani said he was not born a cripple. He said he was lucky to have survived a measles attack at the age of three, which led to his permanent deformity. Tijani added that a child of his step mum, who also contracted the killer disease at the same period with him, succumbed to it and died.
“I was not born this way as I was told by my parents that I had measles, when I was already three years old.
My parents really tried their best to find a solution to the problem, but as God would have it, I was paralyzed in my two legs. I believe that what happened to me has been destined by God; this has made me to accept my fate. My father had two wives. It was the child of the second wife and I that had the measles. I survived the attack, but the other child of my father’s second wife died as a result of the sickness.”
He frowned upon a situation where many physically challenged persons take to begging because of the need to eke out a living. He said that he would never contemplate such a demeaning thing because he would be contented with the meagre profits realised from his embroidery work.
Tijani, however, expressed worry over his inability to afford the payment of rent on his shop due to the current economic hardship in the country.
“I have a shop where I do the embroidery, but since I can no longer pay the rent, I decided to vacate it. The owner of the shop said I should pay N72,000 as three years’ rent.
If I had not learned a skill or have nothing doing for livelihood, then I would have been on the streets as a beggar, begging for alms to take care of my family or begging because of hunger
I appealed to him that I could only afford to give him the two years’ payment, but he said no,” Tijani said.
The physically challenged father of seven, therefore, appealed to Governor Ibikunle Amosun to come to his aid and empower him with N300,000 to bolster his embroidery business .
Tijani, who argued that physically challenged people in the state should not be seen as mentally unbalanced, urged the Amosun administration to assist this category of citizens in order to reduce the rate of begging in the state.
“I am appealing to the government of Senator Ibikunle Amosun to assist me with N300,000 to fully set up my embroidery business. The state government should not help only me but also other physically challenged persons like me in the state. If he can render any assistance to us, you will discover that the number of people who go about begging for alms on the streets would be reduced. He should, please, help us because it is not that
