Begging: Northern Leaders Who ‘Saw Tomorrow’

By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

General Hassan Usman Katsina, the first and only Northern Region Governor, of blessed memory, had fought against begging, particularly in his later days in life up to the time of his death. He predicted the high price that the area that allowed this army of unemployed but menacing beggars, many of them children, would pay in the future, if no positive action was taken against the menace.

He said the army of the young beggars would in future provide the recruiting opportunities for the bandits that would make life unbearable wherever they were operating.

Other northern ‘Nostradamuses’, who also ‘saw tomorrow’ did warn of the severe consequences of allowing the pool of beggars to continue growing with the government just watching the matter without acting against it.

Such people who predicted the severe consequences to be paid for allowing such a recruiting field of unemployed and unskilled children for terrorists and other criminals, include the one time Speaker of the House of Representatives and immediate past governor of Katsina State, Right Honourable Aminu Bello Masari and Alhaji Maitama Sule, a minister in the First Republic, also of blessed memory.

Agreeing with General Hassan about begging, which then and more so now, was preponderant in the North, the former Governor said in a paper he once delivered when he was the Speaker of the House of Representatives between 2003 to 2007, that if the North did not take any proactive action against begging in general and child beggars in particular, there would come a time when they (child beggars) would become a recruiting ground for the bandits and other terrorists and criminals.

Late Alhaji Maitama Sule also made it a life time habit of warning against allowing beggars to grow in numbers in the Northern region in particular, and the country in general. His argument then was that whatever affected one part of the country would eventually affect the whole country. This is what is gradually happening now. Both their predictions came to pass.

Already, some of the anlmajirais are criminals anyway. If they go to a house they would keep on begging for minutes without stopping even when you tell them to go somewhere else as you have nothing to give them. They still would not stop begging if they did not see you physically. But call someone inside the house, and they would come running pretending that they were being called.

However, if after begging and begging, they perceived that nobody was in the house, the children would then go outside and tell their bigger accomplices who would then come into the house as THIEVES, stealing whatever they sighted and that could easily be dispensed with.

A number of them are also spies and or informants to the bandits. Some of the so called almajirai who were apprehended by the Katsina state Police confessed that they were spies and informants who were recruited by the bandits. They report to them possible targets of abduction for ransom.

According to the apprehended boy, they will go to a house which they perceived to belong to a wealthy family, and if the inside of the house happened to be ‘well appointed’, the boy or boys would then report the address to the bandits for attack whenever they were ready. So be wary of the almajiri coming to your house to beg.

Many of the so-called almajirai, in my younger days in the seventies and eighties, grew up in the houses of wayward women, and some of them eventually became ‘spoiled’ children and finally grew up so. Later in life, some of them take to criminal activities, but those luckier, take to some ‘legitimate’ activities but that could not be done by ‘decent’ people, anyway.

Some of the child beggars move with sellers of foods like fried bean cake (known as akara in some parts of the country). They would return the food item to the seller whenever someone bought for them, but turned his back. The seller would then give them half the amount that the buyer gave them, if the children are lucky, or whatever they like or was agreed upon between the child beggars and the seller.

This writer has interacted with some child beggars and some of them confessed to being sent to beg for money by, in most cases, their mothers. They could be lying of course, as in the case of some two insatiable little boys, who were in the habit of going to houses complaining that they had nothing to eat so far. One day one woman whose house was a ‘begging’ place for the boys decided to follow them to their house to find out why they were always kept hungry. It turned out that the boys were lying, as their mother did everything possible (without going out to beg) to feed them.

Again, one day between 11.30 pm and 12.00 am, I asked one such boys why he was still begging up to that time, and he told me that it was his mother who always told him to go to the ‘big’ shop (where I sometimes stopped to buy some things) and get some money for them to buy food in the morning the following day. When I asked the job of his father, he confessed to me that his father was not in the know of what was happening because, according to the boy, his mother hid the fact from the father. This writer found out that what the boy said to be true.

One other child who came begging when this writer happened to be around at the house, said he was sent from Sokoto to Katsina, along with his two brothers, by his father. All three of them, he said, were from the same father and mother, and that their father who remained in Sokoto was also begging because he was, according to the little boy, ‘an orphan’, who had lost his father.

What is most annoying is the fact that many of the child beggars come into this country from the neighbouring countries, whose governments are not lenient with beggars of whatever type, in truck loads. These sort of people form the population of many towns in the north. In fact, a particular town in one of the states in the north is made up mainly by ‘foreigners’, according to an elder, who is a chieftaincy tittle holder, from the town.

There are also what one may call ‘professional’ beggars. These are the types that go to gatherings like mosques, churches or certain ceremonies, telling people that they had not eaten for the whole day or even a number of days. They would therefore solicit for help to enable them to ‘eat’.

Give them what they were after, which was money and eat they would not because they were lying in the first place. Most of the time they operated where there were no food sellers, so that one had no option but to give them money.

Some of them were richer than you and I, with money ‘made’ through this brand of begging.
One of such professional beggars approached me in a mosque after a Friday prayer telling me the same line of lies. One of the people who were with me exposed him saying that the man was lying because it was “his style of begging”.

Of course, there are refugees in the state capitals and some urban areas in the north who were sacked from their towns by the rampaging bandits, but a lot of the people where refugees are kept in the urban areas pretend to be refugees too and therefore beg for ‘food’. But what they really wanted was money. These kind of beggars were found in both genders, with the females going to houses to hoodwink the women.

There are also those who beg in front of chemist shops waving outdated prescription forms, asking for assistance, lying to the potential victim that they were from the hospital where they were given the prescription, but did not have the ‘full’ money to buy the medicine. And they would request for the ‘balance’ to enable them ‘purchase’ what was prescribed for them. Both genders were into this type of begging.

There are beggars in the South as well, but not as much or as open as in the North. The beggars there were more creative. They would come to you pretending to be half blind, deaf, dumb or both asking for assistance through a letter already written, headed ‘to whom it may concern’, which told you that they were so and so needing assistance from you.

These ‘beggars’, who were mostly found in motor parks, but also almost everywhere, including places of worship, would thrust the so called letter at one as if expecting you to give them as their birth right.

And all these are happening in a country where the leaders are stinking rich and the country so abundantly blessed with material resources, some of which are very much in high demand in advanced societies. Such in demand minerals included barium, which was desperately sought by the manufacturers of battery operated vehicles.
There are also gold and diamond in commercial quantities in the Northern part of the country, but some of the leaders would rather harness the resources for their own use, which was why foreign illegal miners were hardly abducted by the bandits.

May God save us an our blessed country, Nigeria.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Abuja.