The 49-year-old driver negotiates the overcrowded, dust-blown streets of Kano with confidence; he is one of hundreds of disabled Nigerians in this city who have taken their fate in their own hands, even as health experts and Islamic leaders argue about how to deal with the crippling disease.
Northern Nigeria's teeming commercial hub is at the centre of both the world's most worrying outbreak of polio and its most fierce dispute between local religious leaders and international experts from the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund, over a vaccination programme.
Foreign health officials warn that if an emergency immunisation drive is delayed then Kano's rising toll of new polio cases could wreck a world-wide drive to eradicate the disease by 2005 and say it has already reinfected populations in neighbouring countries recently declared free of the disease.
But distribution of the oral polio vaccine - the tool through which health agencies have saved millions of children from disability and death elsewhere in the world - has been halted here, amid claims from Muslim clerics that it has been adulterated with anti-fertility agents to trim African populations.
Galadima and his fellow polio sufferers in the 1,200-strong Kano chapter of the Physically Handicapped Association don't really know what to make of the debate - although many say their own kids have been immunised - but they are personally determined not to let disability and prejudice hold them back.
And their self-help scheme owes next to nothing to either international aid agencies or the city's powerful mosques. They have taken responsibility for their education and mobility on themselves, building modified bikes and cars and setting up scholarships for young disabled boys and girls.
This week, the group's secretary general Sufiyanu Ado met AFP in its ramshackle workshop and headquarters and explained its philosophy, while around him polio victims welded together hand-powered tricycles and took it in turns to clean each other's twisted feet.
"Some of us beg by the road. Sometimes people drop small notes as they drive by, but we hate dependence on able-bodied people, that's why we come here to make the bikes," the 34-year-old said, as a young student rode up on a low-slung three-wheeler with hand-driven pedals.
Abdullahi Idris, 18, can't walk, but he studies electrical engineering at technical college - at a cost of 3,650 naira (26 dollars/22 euro) per semester - thanks to a grant from the other members of the association.
"At our weekly meeting some of us give five or ten naira each. We have three students at university, 18 in secondary school and around 15 in primary school," said vice-secretary Mohammed Yahaya Madugu, a tall, well-built man despite the crutches that support him.
A women's group that meets separately supports 11 secondary school and 30 primary age girls, the group says.
"In the cases where the polio victim has family members who can pay for students then we encourage them to do this. When the family cannot take care of him, then the association takes full responsibility," said the 40-year-old chairman, Ayuba Bello, who moves around by hand on small wooden blocks.
"We counsel the families to put them in school. Sometimes the problem is the mentality of the people; if anyone is disabled it's as if he has no ambition in life. We get the families to change that," he said, in his Hausa language.
Apart from occasional small gifts from individuals and local government, the association's income comes from building and converting vehicles. Galadima's Opel has been fitted with an elongated accelator pedal and a lever to operate the brake.
It is parked alongside mopeds fitted with stabiliser wheels for riders who can't support a stationary bike, and dozens of brightly painted three-wheeler push-bikes - built from scratch and retailing for between 10,000 and 15,000 naira (100 dollars) depending on the degree of comfort.
Sometimes families or government buy the bike outright, at other times the group gives a disabled youth a bike and allows him to pay it off over time.
Nigerian health officials are now trying to broker a deal to allow polio vaccination to go ahead. In the meantime, many of those already afflicted by the disease are getting on with life through determination, mechanical know-how and a cheering solidarity.