Farmer Musa Yakubu rushed home with his climbing rope slung across his shoulders and an axe in his hand, to attend to an emergency on a wet Saturday afternoon in September.
Mr Yakubu, a 34-year-old farmer at Saimami, a village in Kuje area council of Nigeria’s capital city Abuja, had to cut short his farm work for that day, after his wife, Mariam, suddenly appeared on the farmland with a message of a relapse of his mother’s condition at the General Hospital in Rubochi, a neighbouring village.
“I wished I could send money through online banking to my sister at Rubochi General Hospital. They only needed some money for my mother’s treatment. But since there were no mobile telephone network services here, I had to be physically present to provide cash,” Mr Yakubu told PREMIUM TIMES in his native Gbagyi dialect after returning from his farm.
In February, the family was thrown into penury following Nigeria’s currency redesign policy which led to the mopping up…