Posted by From IBRAHIM BARDE, Kano on
A 15-year old secondary school boy, Salisu Husseini, has become an instant celebrity, for setting up Fasaha Radio in Bankure, 50 km south of Kano.....
A 15-year old secondary school boy, Salisu Husseini, has become an instant celebrity, for setting up Fasaha Radio in Bankure, 50 km south of Kano.
Salisu Husseini, 15, dazzled adults and teenagers alike when he started broadcasting from a hand carried wooden object which he has constructed with an aerial on it. He further shocked his immediate community and the state at large when he introduced daily and weekly broadcast programmes, ranging from political to children and religious discourses.
Husseini styles himself as the 'GM" of his ‘radio station'. He is a discovery, waiting for whoever could give him a helping hand to develop and enhance his talent.
If a visitor goes to Bankure today, the first question that he is asked is whether he is looking for the house of the 'owner of Fasaha Radio Station." He is known now by everybody in the town and daily, people come to the frontage of his home to watch how he conducts himself. Salisu Husseini tells how he manages his newly found fame, his struggles, aspirations, targets and his ambition.
His story
My name is Salisu Husseni, I am 15 years old. My father died when I was seven years old. I am a class two student at a junior secondary school.
Nobody taught me how to build my own radio transmitter. Personally, I love engineering. One day, I took my radio receiver to the technician to repair for me, but the man wasted my time by telling me to go and come back when I got tired of his ‘go come', I took back the receiver from him. I opened the radio into pieces and repaired it myself. I went back to the technician and told him that I had been able to repair it myself, just to let him know that I can do it too. From there, I became a radio repairer but soon after, my mother banned me from repairing radio because of arguments that clients raised either before or after the repair had been completed.
Again, one day, I went to our primary school and picked pieces of amplifier that one of our teachers brought. It had been lying there for more than two years. I took it home and reduced everything into pieces. I was just trying to detect why the amplifier did not work. After I had joined the relay from the speaker with that of the battery to the aerial of the speaker, I was just saying to myself, ‘can this thing work?' then I just heard what I was saying from the radio set of one man who was passing by. It was then I knew that I had set up a radio transmitter.
People say I am popular, yes I am popular but that is not my pre-occupation now. What I want is someone to help me to learn so that I could improve on my present crude technology advancement, where I would be exposed to new, modern technologies and learn how to do better than what I have just done. I want to be educated. I want to set up a company that could create things for our use in Nigeria; my parents have agreed and everybody around me that I could be taken abroad to improve my knowledge and get education. Right now, we run daily and weekly programmes like any other well established radio stations.
I am calling on the state and the Federal Government to come to my aid.