Inspiring story of Ogunleye, a one-arm sand-digger

He is physically challenged but ekes out a living from a job even the able-bodied find tedious.
Joshua Ogunleye, 44, was born with his left arm deformed and paralysed. But the father of four has surmounted this hurdle of deformity in fending for his family.
Rather than take to begging for alms, Ogunleye, who prides himself on the maxim which says there’s dignity in labour, joins other able-bodied Nigerians, not minding his disability, in the difficult job of sand-digging from the Ogun River in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
Ogunleye, popularly called Baba Bolu, says because of his belief that there is ability in disability, he had to join his colleagues 19 years ago at the river, shortly after his parents’ death, to earn a living and raise a family of his own.
Our correspondent’s visit to his Apo, Abeokuta ‘office’ located close to the Ogun River, reveals the sheer will with which Baba Bolu has been carrying out his job of sand-digging with dignity.
The nature of the tedious job requires Ogunleye and his colleagues to cross to the other side of the river in a canoe in which they collect the dug sand before ferrying it back to the bank of the river, where it is sold.
Interestingly, 20 bowls of the sand, making a yard, as it is being measured, is sold for a paltry N150.
Yet, for almost two decades, Baba Bolu has been engaged in this highly tedious but poorly rewarding job.
Relating his pathetic experience, Ogunleye says that his hope of going further in his education was dashed when he lost his father and his mother too, got involved in an auto crash that claimed her two legs.
The only means left for him to earn a living, he says, is the sandcarrying business from which he realises N800 per day.
According to him, “I was already in primary school when my father died in 1981. That was the time Major General Oladipupo Diya was the governor of Ogun State. So, I could not continue my studies. I later went to live with my sister until I finished my primary school. But I didn’t have the opportunity to go to secondary school because my mother had an accident in which she lost her two legs. We then left Abeokuta and went to a village called Owode- Egba. I later returned to Abeokuta but there was nothing for me to do.
“I learnt a trade in selling singlets, but there was no money to establish myself. I had to leave the business to look for another job; that was how I got this sand work around 1997 at Ita Oshin, where I use to pack and carry sand to feed myself. Then, a yard was N50. But a yard here is N150. That means one would have carried 20 bowls of sand. It’s a very difficult work. Before I can carry the sand to where trucks would come and park it, it is not easy. And with all the stress of the job, which we start from around 10am and close at 6pm everyday, none of us here can boast of making N700 everyday.” On how he has been managing to cope in such a tedious job, despite his disability, he says, “I have been doing this job since 1998, after the death of Abiola.
“But where I am working now, I carry two bowls of sand together, which some of my colleagues cannot do, and I think I do this by the grace of God . I don’t need to use drug before I do my job, like some of my co-worker who make use of Tramado and Ibucap drugs to make them work effectively, which may affect them in the future.
“Though I don’t feel any pain on my disabled arm while working because I was born that way, but when I return home from work, I usually take pain relieving drugs. This kind of work is not usually easy during the rainy season. We are only fortunate that we have a canoe to carry the sand from the other side of the river, and that is when my colleagues and I will put our bowls down to start packing the sand to where it is being loaded into the trucks.”
He further says that he decided to engage in the difficult job of sand-digging because he would not like a situation where he would be dependent on family members and friends, who also have personal financial obligations to meet.
Asked why he has not tried begging like so many other people with one form of disability or the other, Ogunleye says, “God forbid! I can’t do that; that’s why I am doing sand work. It is a big shame for me to take to the streets and start begging. God should not let me have the problem that will force me to go on the streets to beg for alms. Although there are some people who are even disabled in any form, yet they beg. But, for me, I can’t do it.”
He, however, says with some help from government or any public-spirited individual, he can engage in some less tedious but more rewarding job with which he can fend for his family.
“If the government can give me enough money, I have a business that I can do, like a phone charging business and operating a pepper grinding machine. I think if I am able to get capital to do this business in a place where there is patronage, I will make enough profit,” Ogunleye says.
Recalling the circumstances that resulted in his deformity, the father of four says, “I was born this way. But the cause of my problem was the story I heard about my parents that when they had a child before me and the child died after a short while, my father’s younger brother, who felt so bad about this development, twisted the hand of the dead child before it was buried. By the time they gave birth to me, I came out this way with my left arm paralysed. I could remember that I was taken to UCH, Ibadan at the age of six and the doctors were unable to find a solution to my deformed arm.”
Ogunleye has, therefore, lost any hope of regaining his deformed arm, saying, “I don’t think there can be any surgical operation on my arm. If there should have been anything as such, it would have been when I was young.”