Honesty hardly makes sense these days to many young people in the blind race to amass wealth. Salisu Auwalu has become an oasis in the desert of dishonesty, and he has reinvented hope in tomorrow’s youth by his display of integrity. Some of his mates normally see uprightness as a loss of opportunity.
However, that simple act of honesty has now turned him into a nationally celebrated personality, a position the money he found and returned to the owner could not have bought for him.
His journey to this prestigious podium started when the young man went out on his daily routine, picking passengers from one point of the town to the other on a shared tricycle belonging to his friend Sulaiman.
Auwalu was born of humble but highly disciplined parents. Auwalu’s father Salisu Galadima hawks fresh meat by the roadside while his mother Khadija Muhammed takes care of the kids and the house.
There was not enough to sustain his education and he had to drop out of school to work as a “keke” rider. He started by sharing his friend’s keke because he couldn’t get one for himself at that time.
It was around noon on that fateful Wednesday when he set out to work along Badawa Layout in Kano. There, he met three men standing by the roadside with a bag before them. He stopped and picked them for a fare of N500 to Tafawa Balewa Way in Kano.
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They dropped the bag at the open booth at the back of the tricycle. He took off to the agreed location where he dropped them. None of them remembered the bag they had dropped at the back. Even Awwalu did not.
Young Awwalu had not had breakfast then, so he decided to go back home to fetch something to eat, having been able to make N500.
He could not get any passenger on his way back home. As a usual practice, he stopped at Yankaba roundabout in Kano to clean up the tricycle, having dropped off passengers.
He immediately noticed a bag at the open booth of the tricycle. He got hold of the bag and saw that it was stashed with hard currency. He recalled that it belonged to the trio he had dropped off a while ago.
As a well-brought-up child, he immediately rushed home with the bag of money to show his mother what was left in the tricycle. In the family tradition, she immediately referred him to his father who subsequently directed him to his uncle, who is seen as the decision maker of the family.
It was decided that they go back to where he dropped the trio with his uncle to see if they could find the owners of the bag. But they were nowhere to be found.
They decided not to take the money anywhere but to keep it and wait for any “lost but found” announcement on radio, to avoid giving the money to the wrong hands.
The money, N3 million in Nigerian currency and N12 million equivalent in foreign currency, was kept safe as they waited for a radio announcement.
On Saturday morning, three days after, came an announcement on Arewa Radio, Kano, that some people were looking for a bag of money left in a tricycle. His mother recorded the announcement from the radio including the contact phone numbers of the owners announced.
He called one of the numbers five times but there was no response. He tried the other number and the call was taken immediately.
The man from the other end sounded furious at first, but when Awwalu told him that he found the lost money, the man immediately became friendly. He wanted to come and collect the money but they refused and asked him to meet them at the radio station where the announcement was made for the lost money.
On arrival at the radio station, he recognized the trio who had left the bag; they were merchants from Tchad Republic.
They were given the bag and they counted the money and saw it was intact; not a kobo was missing.
They immediately opened the gate for praises and recognition for young Awwalu Salisu who found their money and returned it by giving him N400,000 in appreciation.
From then on, he has received recognitions, cash gifts, ambassadorship and scholarships for his honesty from groups and individuals across the country including the Sultan of Sokoto and the Emir of Kano.
He had set an example and given hope for a better future for Nigerian youths with exemplary honesty.
Born on January 2, 2002, Auwalu Salisu who is from Yankaba Quarters in Kano, Nasarawa LGA of Kano State, attended Ihsanul Manna Islamiyya Primary School at Yankaba. He proceeded to Government Secondary School, Kawaji, where he dropped out from SS1 due to lack of money to sponsor his education, and started working as a tricycle rider.
This act of goodness has bought a life greater and more prestigious for him than what the N15 million would have done if he had not returned it.
Apart from the cash gifts he got, running into millions of naira, a brand new keke, food items and textile materials, he also received scholarship for his education up to tertiary level. He has become a leading youth in Nigeria honoured in the presence of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Bola Ahmad Tinubu, by a leading national daily, the LEADERSHIP newspaper.
For his honesty, Auwalu Salisu has since returned to school; he is now a student of Tijjani Ibrahim College of Education, Kano.
