If you are looking for where street begging and insecurity pick up speed or press forward and become the biggest industries, I entreat you not to pile on pressure and stress while looking for one; kindly come down to northern Nigeria. This menace called street begging – a practice of open solicitation for assistance with money, food, clothing from anonymous wayfarers, through pleas, flagrant deceit or exposure of deformities is a highly recognised profession in northern Nigeria. The presence of these vagrants in the streets, along main roads, bus stations, mosques etc, is an unpleasant embarrassment to the region.
Sheltering, accommodation and living arrangements for these street beggars are uncertain. They live essentially transient lives, sleeping in makeshift places such as vicinity of Mosques, front of closed stores, roads underpasses and under the bridges. They walk like locusts; dark and grim but fascinating, wearing scanty dresses, with the status identification bowls in their hands. They wander in aimless congregation. At regular chords in melancholic unison, they beg willing passersby to give them alms for the sake of Allah.
Periodically, an engrossed good Samaritan, who may be touched by their lean and hungry faces and extruding ribs, would, as a show of humanitarian concern, drop a coin into the ocean of wants of the underprivileged boys. At every such windfall, there are struggling, cracking of bowls, and scrambled, followed by a shout of thanks, asking for Allah’s blessing on the donor. Annoyingly, they give no one any breathing space or choice whether or not to give. They go to all extents to harass people to give even against their wish. They terrorise and harass the public at all eating places and petrol stations to such an extent that one has to think twice before deciding in which restaurants to eat for fear of intimidation.
Street beggars have found themselves at odd with society which has condemned them perpetually to suffer from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Confronted with harsh realities of life, deprived by lack of education of any kind of employment, weakened, disabled or crippled by disease, poverty or accident, denied of all social amenities, and treated as pariah by the society, they see and find themselves with no other choice or alternative but one which they are compelled to adopt begging.
Also the second largest industry in my region is insecurity which comprises banditry, herders/farmers crises, kidnapping, armed robbery and terrorism. Haders/farmers crises has been in vogue in Plateau, Nasarawa, Benue and Taraba. Banditry, is now commonplace in Zamfara, Sokoto and Kaduna. Meanwhile terrorism has been reigning in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. These are states where coldblooded employees of hard-boiled employers come on motorcycles virtually on daily basis to kill their fellow human beings for a reason only known to them. All along, political thugs and armed robbers have been terrorizing Kogi. The state is trembling and boiling like a hot water. All the while, kidnapping, mother of all, has become a daily business in northern Nigeria.
When there is no flawless and effectual education policy, when people have been left to fend for themselves, when creativity and occasional laziness is not addressed, the general rule is heedlessness breeds all forms of criminal acts. No one can denied the fact that street begging breeds terrorism in northern Nigeria; it’s also notable and widely known that government apathy or lethargy breeds street begging. The menace was initially given a slim attention, and it was seen as a lesser evil. Nigerian government always failed to take the bull by the horns until things get worse. This has been the folklore of our government.
Street begging is one of the greatest, most perplexing and intractable problem in northern Nigeria at present. Any genuine government that takes creating a healthy society as its core mandate, will do everything possible to ensure that a great portion of its population do not make a living on full and part time overt and covert parasitism. Peace can’t be maintained in a region where a minor is roaming the streets with Garri, spending the whole day begging for money to buy sugar. That region will definitely be far from being a peace ground but a rather crime hub of the nation.
Sadly! Begging has become Nigeria’s illegal export commodity that has not yet been declared contraband. Our leaders appeared to be indifferent about knowing the genesis, persistence and social organization of street begging as well as insecurity in northern Nigeria much less to put an end to it. Isn’t a time for our leaders to distinguish themselves from those wobble thinkers who can’t see beyond their noses. Why can’t they transformed into thoughtful human beings who display interest or foresight into what the future contained? When will they stop being parasite and act like leaders who really care about us?
I wonder why a region endowed with so much wealth gloss over a malignant social disease that indicts its sense of value and insults its pride. The ill-effects of this menace doesn’t stop at that, it made it very easy for hard-boiled employers of abandoned and poverty-stricken children to recruit as many as they deem fit. From street begging, most of these high and dry people graduate to street gangs, human traffickers, prostitution, bag and phone snatchers. It also produces official refugees, war-and HIV orphaned children, displaced population, problem families, abandoned kids and widows, and all sorts of modern slavery.
Don’t our so-called leaders have the conscience to ask themselves questions like: What are the moral values of a society where school-aged children are on the streets, begging? What is the essence of being leaders when we allowed unscrupulous adults to abuse children with impunity by sending them to meander in-between vehicles, thereby exposing them to dangers? Why would such adults, who are supposed to fend for them, sit under the protection of tree waiting to collect proceeds of the day from the children? These are the questions leaders with moral sense of right and whose consciences are still alert should ask themselves.
These children are supposed to be future leaders but for the callousness and indifference of a thick skinned leaders where the leadership is uncaring and lethargic about societal deviation; where the leadership is defined by self-serving and not caring; where the leadership is pleased with the unpleasant situation of the society.
Finally, it behoves our leaders to sacrifice their ostentatious life to discern a modus operandi which should be use to clear street beggars from the public domain, and integrate them into the economic, social and political life.
Amiru Halilu writes from Kaduna. Follow him @AmiruHalilu
