I started working when I was 10 years old – Panam Percy Paul

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Nigerian gospel musician, Panam Percy Paul, has revealed that he got his very first payable job at the tender age of 10.

Speaking in an interview with The Punch, the singer revealed that his father’s teachings led him down the path of becoming a man at a young age.

According to Paul, he decided to get a job as a dry cleaner and shoe shiner for soldiers at about the time civil war broke out in the country, and he was being paid one Pound, one Shilling daily.

In his words; ”I think I was just about five years old when my father started talking to us about the essence of life. You could imagine a little boy of five being awakened every morning by 3am by my father who would talk with us about the philosophy of life till about 6am.

Interestingly, my father did that till I turned 19 years and he never failed doing that except he was out on official duty. The philosophy he taught us was just amazing. He taught us how to be responsible for ourselves and not to borrow. If he had any reason to tell you not to do certain things, he would also give you reasons for that.

Again, I remember when I was about 10 years old and my father called me and said, “Do you know you are not a man?” I was really shocked by that question; in fact, I panicked because I was just wondering whether I was a woman. In that struggle, I reached for my trousers and wanted to undo the button. I wanted to show him that I have the ‘apparatus’ of a man. When he saw what I wanted to do, he simply laughed and said, “That ‘thing’ under your trousers does not make you a man but a male, just like the one in front of a woman does not make her a woman but a female.”

I was confused the more and when I asked him who a man was, he said, “A man is a person who takes care of his responsibilities one hundred per cent without borrowing.” Now, it was that clause ‘without borrowing’ that was a difficult one to deal with. When I asked him how does one start life without borrowing, he said to me, “Serve; when you serve, you will be paid for your services and you can save and with your savings, you can build your future.”

At the time, the civil war was about to start and soldiers were being recruited. I went to the army barracks where I got myself employed by 19 soldiers as their washerman, shoe shiner and they were paying me one pound and one shilling every day. And my father’s salary at the time was 25 pounds. In other words, I was making 19 pounds and 19 shillings every month, just five pounds short of my father’s salary at the time.

You could imagine the upbringing and my father was excited that I could think of doing that and he made us to pay our school fees. He could do that but he just encouraged us to take care of ourselves. So, right from age 10, I had learnt how to take care of myself and at age 19 when I left secondary school, I told my father that I was already a man but he said to me: “What kind of man are you when you are still living in my house?” A few months later after our discussion, I left his house for the city as an undergraduate studying Mechanical Engineering. That was how I became a man by the teachings and upbringing of my father.”