Child’s Street Begging And Our Orientation

By

Auwal Shehu

alwaaj@yahoo.com

The need for Nigerian society to reorient itself and usher in attitudinal changes cannot be over emphasized. From every prism of assessment and analysis our present orientation in general as citizens of this country depicts a lamentable picture painted in blurring vision. The conventional agents of orientation/socialization which includes; family, school, peer-group, government, neighborhoods and working places are all in shambles discharging half way of what is expected of them.

There can hardly be enough a man capable of exposing or presenting the uncountless ills bedeviling our contemporary society, yet these ills remain the products of one agent of socialization or the other. Perchance it is safe to assert that one failure from one agent always led to too many ills. Upon this belief the family as the foundation of learning is faulted largely for the perpetual build up of shameful army of child beggars. 

A healthy family should feed, love and take care of every child member. The expectations are similar in every human society. At this early point of human growth emphasis isn’t about material volume but psychological attention. Attention to happiness, safety and orientation. Parents supposed to attend to children meals request and guide them against the dangers with the immediate environment. They should position themselves to inculcate orientations by disseminating the practice of accepted norms and values.

Regrettably this golden fact of expectation has since vanished into thin air; the couples are only interested lasciviously to be called a family. They aren’t ready to shoulder responsibilities that grow with normal family. This sadden attitude is more pronounced in the northern part of the country. States like Kano, Jigawa, Kaduna, katsina, Sokoto, Gusau, Niger, Bauchi, Maiduguri, yobe, and Abuja are infested with the countless numbers of victim children whose parents refuses to discharge as expected.

Walk to any Conner, or department store, restaurant or food bucker, and a group of these children is what welcome you first. They are stationed attentively to every move by a shopper. Some said they count the number of spoons intake by a customer visiting a restaurant and count changes paid over the counter. They beg and roam about in cities and towns with no definite place to sleep or eat. They moved in tattered dirty dresses. They are often exposed into unbeneficial force labour by the Mallams in the farms and other domestic schedules.

A lot of reasons were illustrated to lead to these bestial ordeals regarding these children. But the major reason is the “Makaranta”. Makaranta which literally means school with a head teacher as mallam consists of a group of children approved by their parents to be students to that mallam in the same town or on transit for a long duration of time, with an overt objective for the student to be taught the study of Quran and other Islamic culture. In this set-up no fees are paid by the parents no accommodation is provided and the enrollment age is flexible. Most often the mallam is without any definite occupation if he chooses to move to a new town, and where he stays within his town, the farm remains the only engagement for him and the children. The circular movement associated to this Makaranta is vice-versa; children transported to Mallam or Mallam transferring to a new habitat with his pupils.

Limited to parent/mallam arrangement this mode of school existed for long period of time but loosely at logger head with the traditional rulers in the northern region of the country. Appalled by the widening gap the northern region suffered akin to western education in comparism to other regions, the rulers enforced measures that compelled every child for formal school. Few radical fathers and Mallams ran to new domain with pockets of pupils justifying their move against the order wrongly by quoting a verse or two from the Quran subjectively.

This was further displayed as revolt against the traditional rulers with the introduction of the democratic period of second republic. The former influence exercised by the rulers wane off and both children parents stayed-foot against western education. The situation remained and exploited by some Politian who fanned the discord between the traditional rulers and the ordinary parents to their advantage, building unrealistic freedom feeling amongst the parents.

Another sordid enlargement of this Makaranta abuse is a cross border movement from the neighboring countries especially Niger, Chad and Cameroun both by the Mallams and their pupils. They besieged all the bigger cities and squatted at uncompleted buildings and claimed to be teaching a numerous party of their pupils migrated together. The children are in return reduced as foot-soldiers to beg for food and money for the Mallams. You notice the activities of these children as domestic helps and errands while the mallam take the paltry payment.

The prolong absence of any policy to caution this society’s evil from the family failure has created a room in our culture rapaciously. This cultural acceptance is abuse beyond any imaginable level and everybody is paying dearly for the consequences. These children mature to be thugs; they graduated to be destitute devoid of any economic skill and answerable to any vandal organization. The other foreign class matures with little or no sense of belonging, available to kill, or recruit to aid in breaking law and order in our society. The painful impact to this is beyond any imagination with the prevailing evidence in major of our cities where life is reduced to the cheapest commodity amongst all and sundry.

Since the authority to monitor the affairs of their local society is stripped off them, the traditional rulers should guide the political leaders into effecting a workable policy that can rescind this trend. Makaranta can be blended into the curriculum of a formal school and co-exist beneficially. Both parents and Mallam should be taught to appreciate the beauty of love and life of their children. The family should be forced to shoulder its responsibility by providing the necessary attitudinal orientation and attention. Other religious authorities in the society who appreciates begging should be enlightened to the collectoral damage this facet of orientation has thrown our society into.

Boldly the northern governors should religiously embrace the almajiri education program introduced by the federal government to compel every child into it. Statistical assessment in conjunction with the immigration unit be put to use in ascertaining who are the indigenous beggars. Unwavering policy be mapped out through the legislative bodies to stop this type of begging.