Curiosity was the main reason for choosing to ride
in Ms. Aisha Umar’s taxi in the Federal Capital Territory on Friday.
Ms. Aisha Umar has been a taxi driver in Abuja for
over five years. Her handling of the vehicle is professional. She calls out for
passengers and attends to matters relating to her job cheerfully and promptly
too. She is never shy; and almost every day, she has had to answer questions,
especially from many inquisitive male passengers. That, she does, courteously.
According to her, taxi business was the last thing
on her mind when she dropped out of the university over 10 years ago.
Click to read more after the cut...
She was in her second year studying Public
Administration at the University of Abuja when she became pregnant.
Her initial plan was to take a break for one year to
have her baby and then return to the school to complete her studies.
But the plan failed and that changed her course.
Today, Aisha, a 33 year old single parent, is a taxi
driver in the FCT. She is the first lady taxi driver in the nation’s capital.
She was the only woman in the business for over five
years until about six months ago when another lady took up the job at the FCT,
apparently impressed by Aisha’s success.
And business has been good, she admits.
According to her, she pays her rents and takes care
of the family with what she makes from the taxi.
Five years is a lot of time to perfect the
commercial driving act and most people are not surprised that the lady handles
the steering, driving around the city, picking and dropping passengers with a
high level of dexterity.
Aisha, a mother of two, told our correspondent why
she had to abandon her trading business and went into taxi business. She said
it started by accident.
She had returned from Algeria, leaving her husband
behind when it was obvious that the marriage would not work. She came back to
Abuja with two kids, a boy and a girl.
She immediately went into trading and was dealing in
clothing materials.
As a lively woman, many liked to patronize her.
She bought a car, a Nissan Sunny. It helped her to
move the wares around, supply interested friends while she collected money
later.
Only few paid for the materials on delivery; many
bought on credit. The debt kept mounting and it was beginning to affect the
business. She was fed up but she could not call it quits because there was no
other means of survival.
One Saturday, she set out to meet some of her
debtors. It was all stories, Aisha said. She became dejected. The fuel in her
car was running low and she needed to top it up but there was no money.
As she was driving back home, dejectedly, a
middle-aged man who appeared stranded, having waited for a cab for about an
hour, flagged her down. Aisha stopped, almost absent-mindedly.
The guy asked if she could take him to Asokoro. She
agreed and got N350 for the effort. And as soon as the man alighted from the
car, another man entered and paid N400 for a journey of about the same
distance. That was how it started.
She said, “At Wuse, a man stopped me and asked if he
could help get more passengers into the car at N50 each and I accepted. And I
got N250 on the short trip.
“That first day, I went home with N1, 700, that was
after I had filled my tank with N2, 300 worth of fuel.”
The next day, she hit the road very early. And since
then, she has not looked back.
Aisha has changed her car. It was in 2008, a year
after she started the taxi business. She bought another Nissan Sunny for N650,
000. It was an imported used car, but a newer model.
She has not set eyes on her estranged husband since
they parted many years ago. But she is not bothered about that. As long as her
taxi business is not hampered in any way that will affect the upkeep of her
children, she is happy.
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