21 Jan 2009 |
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| Have you seen the pictures?
Revolutionary, but child-abusing, female beggars from Niger are slowly invading major cities in southern Nigeria. The key words here are Revolutionary and Child-Abuse. More about those words shortly.
Niger is the country directly north of Nigeria. For many years now, professional beggars from there have moved steadily south. They are here in Port Harcourt, Enugu, Onitsha, Owerre, Aba and other major cities. They are also in many western Nigerian cities. They are not interested in working.
I say they are revolutionary because, quietly but persistently, they have redefined the image of typical street beggars in southern Nigeria. Before their arrival, the unwritten Beggars Manual here required that a street beggar must be either (a) physically handicapped with a visible deformity of leg or arm or (b) blind or (c) mentally sick to the extent that they fit what we, in local parlance, generally refer to as mad people.
In all my years growing up in southeastern Nigeria, it was extremely rare, in fact nearly impossible, to see a street beggar who did not display one of these impediments – physical handicap, blindness, or mental illness. If any man or woman ever dreamed of street begging as a vocation but did not fit into any of these categories, I am certain that he or she quickly dispensed of the thought and found some gainful employment or engaged in private industry. Why? If people ever saw a healthy person on the street, begging, they would give him nothing but instead deride and insult him until he left the street. Yes, pride and shame ensured that in southeastern Nigeria, healthy people had no business on the street, begging.
But now here comes the street beggar from Niger: no physical handicap, no mental illness, not even a pretense of madness. Their formula is revolutionary in its simplicity – you only need to be a foreign woman and have a young child, preferably an infant, with you, and dangle an empty cup or plate in front of passersby or motorists, pleading for money.
Stand at a distance and watch how this formula works like magic. People are now glad to give to healthy foreigners holding babies and begging but would give nothing to healthy local people begging. It works so well that these Niger beggars boldly offer to give you change if your excuse for not giving them something is because you have only large currency notes. Yes, these beggars give change. They boldly open their bags, full of money, and retrieve the exact change for you. Looking at street begging as a business, I doubt that any student or professor of business administration in Nigeria can think of a better formula for successful begging in southern Nigeria.
But these Niger women street beggars, in spite of their revolutionary formula, are essentially abusing children. Watch those children. Why are they not in school? They look sullen, distant, tired; all day the scorching sun bakes their young brains while the adult women drag them along from passerby to motorist. The very young, the infants, just days or weeks old, are clutched in the women’s arms, under the blazing sun, all day.
Where are the fathers of these children? Why are these fathers never on the street begging? Are they in Niger or lurking around the street corners in Nigeria near the women? Or are these children fathered by Nigerian men? Worse, is it true, as I heard, that some of these children do not really belong to the women but are instead rented from their real parents strictly to use them for begging? Where is the outrage of Nigerians and the international community when infants and young children are so brazenly being abused?
Below are some of the pictures that I managed to take.
These children, and many others whose pictures I will not post, told me, in plain English, that they did not attend schools. The adults pretended not to speak English at all. Some spoke clear Hausa and I pretended that I did not understand them too.
This beautiful child should be in school. There is no better help for beggars than to force them to put their children in school. Otherwise the circle of poverty and begging will never end.
Here was one lady digging into her money bag to give me change. She had agreed to let me take her picture if I gave her money. I did. Then guess what she did after taking the money? See the next picture. I could hear her laughing and talking to her partners in a strange language as I walked away. I think they were saying "there goes the mugu"
This is the proper begging expression.
Where are the fathers of these, and the other thousands of children with these beggars? Why are the fathers never on the street begging?
This particular group were busy counting my change from their heavy bag of money as I took this picture. Once you step away from them, you can see them in clusters exchanging pleasant banters with a happier countenance different from the one presented to the passerby in order to separate him from his money.
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