From Paul Orude Bauchi
There is excitement among residents of Badejo village in Potiskum Local Government Area of Yobe State, following the discovery of coins believed to have been buried in a farm 75 years ago.
The discovery of the coins, valued at N10 million today, was made by Ibrahim Badejo and his team.
Ibrahim Badejo is one of the great grandsons of the original owner of the farm and founder of the community, Mai Shuwa Badejo.
Badejo is the Chief Executive Officer and founder of Kakasku Blan Integrated Farm and Hatchery located in Badejo.
He was undergoing a fully funded Master’s degree programme in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Jiangnan University, Wuxi, Jiangsu in China when the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020.
Badejo was in Nigeria when the pandemic broke so he remained in his country as a lockdown was imposed.
“After I came back from China due to the CONVID 19, there was no job,” he told Saturday Sun. “Poultry production has been my childhood activity, so I discussed with my father that I wanted to open a poultry farm to produce poultry feeds, eggs and provide veterinary services.”
His father gave his approval but Badejo said the major hurdle to starting his dream business was funding. But he vowed he was not going to allow that hurdle hinder his dream so he sold personal belongings and registered his business with the Corporate Affairs Commission. That was how Badejo started the Kakasku Blan Integrated Farm and Hatchery, a poultry production company that produces day old chicks, poultry feeds, organic fertiliser, eggs, table size Broilers and vegetables.
He opened a corporate account and started sourcing for funding within and outside Nigeria, applying for over 20 grants.
“I got the Nigeria Youth investment Funds which I started with, hoping that something would come up and I would get money in the future,” he said.
Badejo’s father was supportive of his son’s dream.
“My father gave me a plot of land that he inherited from his father. His father also inherited the land from his own father,” he said.
The young entrepreneur managed to raise some money and together with the Youth Investment grant began to lay the foundation for his poultry business.
Unfortunately, after eight months work on construction of the site for project was halted because of money.
“In April 2021 I applied for a grant from USAID. I had an innovative fertilizer that I use to formulate and apply on my father’s farm. The US government was looking for innovation that would boost food production and employment because the COVID 19 pandemic came with huge losses of jobs.
“A lot of people depend on daily wages and the lockdown stopped them. Most people could not go to farm and lots of problem came with COVID 19 so USAID opened the challenge as part of the future initiative by the US government,” he said.
Badejo applied with his innovative fertiliser project.
“It is a local fertiliser and it does not have any environmental effect and it can stay on the farm for say five or, six years,” he explained. “It took me over two months to fill all the forms and I was doing that every day and night. Overall it was for Nigerians only and over 4000 organisations applied in Nigerian and they were looking for just 33.
“It was taxing. At a time I was discouraged that I don’t think I can get this grant. Some people were discouraging me. We did the first stage application, I was qualified and scaled through, the next was due diligence and I was also successful.
“The final list was eventually released and I was successful and we started in September. The grant provided us with modern machine for production of modern feeds, incubators.”
Badejo’s company started implementation and laying of the hall for the construction of the poultry in January 2022.
He was working on the construction of the poultry farm with some of his staff who were labourers when they stumbled upon a clay pot containing huge amounts of money buried in the ground.
“They were the ones digging manual pit for the poultry pen because we were going to use battery cage. They were Samaila Baba, Magaret Ayuba, Maryamu Jeremiah and Yusuf Jibril Batele
“They discovered the old coins in a small earthen pot when they were digging our poultry manure pit. It was deep actually as they dug. I wasn’t expecting anything, honestly. They were taken aback initially because they thought it was charms. The pot was broken and behold, we saw several pieces of coins.”
Badejo said nobody knew exactly where the money was hidden but his father told him the story after the discovery.
“My father told me that his mother told him that the owner of the land, who was my great grandfather, hid money in the ground, but they don’t know the exact location.”
“I didn’t know about this story until after the discovery. It was believed to have been buried by Mai Shuwa Badejo, the founder of Badejo community. He was a very influential and wealthy man with many cattle. According to the story, he didn’t even know the number of cattle he had. He was also involved in crop farming.”
According to Badejo, his great grandfather was persecuted heavily in those days by the traditional institution.
“The traditional ruler’s messengers would just come to his house and say, ‘the king wants the biggest cow.’
“There was a time they saw a big ram in his house and said the king wanted it and would come the next morning for it.
“That night he directed that the ram be slaughtered and the skin kept for him. The family ate the ram. The next morning they came and he told them the ram died and his children had eaten it. In those days, there was no religion so people ate dead animals.
“As the persecution continued, there was a time he contemplated migrating to Gombe because of the persecution.
“When the Europeans came, they wanted to give him a paper to be a first class chief, but the chiefs opposed it. My dad, who is now in his 70s, was a little boy then and didn’t know his grandfather well. It was his elder brother that knew him but he has died now.
“The coins discovered were British coins; they were produced in the UK and distributed across West African countries of Gold Coast, Nigeria and so on. There is one of 1930s etc. My father told me that the money might have been buried around 1936. He was a little boy then so I didn’t have an understating of it. My father told me that his father had money buried somewhere but nobody knew among the children the spot. But they knew that it was a lot of money buried under the ground.
“His father was not the only child and even if the money was shared he would get a small share because his grandfather had lots of children. His father was second to the last born. He was wealthy but his father was poor. He died a poor man but he put my father in school and educated his children who became important persons in the society today. My father’s reaction was pity because the money could have been heads of cattle. He must have sold lots of cattle for that money. Every family member wants to get a piece of the coins to keep for the future.
“We want to auction the coins to any interested museum, persons or historical institutions both within and outside Nigeria,” he explained to Saturday Sun.