By Awaal Gata
Along Abuja-Lokoja expressway Giri is located, barely eight kilometres before Gwagwalada.
Despite the teeming population of settlers in the community, the barns and the mud and the reedy houses that form its architecture give it an agrarian feeling – and it really is.
When Blueprint visited the community before noon yesterday, there were plenty of women. Men were few. Children were fewer.
The men had gone to their farms, the children had gone to school, but the women were at home doing pottery businesses.
“We have two types of occupations in this community; men are farmers, and women are pot makers. The children go to western schools; you won’t see anybody in the morning. Nobody is idle here,” Uba Mohammed, a member of the community, told our correspondent.
On the road side, adjacent University of Abuja’s staff quarters, dozens of women, some with babies strapped on their backs, sat in torn umbrellas selling the crafts of their potteries. Their potteries can be seen from where they were sitting.
“My husband farms and I sell these,” Safiya Abdulkadir, a mother of two, said, pointing to a heap of pots, asusu (clay safe) hearth and others clay-made products displayed for customers.
“Once you are a woman in Giri, you must know how to do the work. Nobody must teach you. We grew up seeing our mothers doing it, and they too met their mothers doing it,” Safiya added.
For an elderly potter, Aisha, “here in Giri pot-making was started since time that no one can remember again, and it is moving from generation to generation.”
According to Aisha, “in the past, many of our women were great because of this business; some even had more money and fame than men.”
But the trade is no longer lucrative, obviously because of modernity.
According Safiya, before she got married in 2006, she earned about N3,000 daily from the trade, but she hardly earns N1,000 in a day now.
She attributed the low patronage to “people don’t like anything made by clay again. They have alternatives. The only thing that sells now is asusu, but asusu doesn’t bring enough money”.
At the backdrop of the low patronage, the potters are begging for government’s intervention. They believe if they are empowered with modern tools, which would let them bake clays into shapes and patterns required by the modern market, the business would regain its lustre.
“If the government helps us with modern equipments things will change and we will be able to make clays into items and designs people now want”, Safiya opined.
“If we are empowered, nobody should worry about lack of employment among Giri women,” she added.
Corroborating the potters, Abdullahi Manko, a young teacher in the community, said: “there are a lot of talents in the community as far as pottery is concerned, but they lack modern skills. Government should just train them a little bit and nobody would hear of women’s unemployment in the community.”
“Government needs to come here; there are skills here that can compete in the international market,” he added, as he playfully kneaded a lump of clay into an oblong shape.
