It is so troubling seeing healthy children who ought to be in schools being used as beggars at the bus-stops, road intersections and along our streets.
It’s time all the unrepentantly incorrigible parents who release their children for this unhealthy practice are stopped in their tracks.
Truth be told, it is not in the DNA of healthy Anambra people to beg for alms, least of all, children.
It is ironical that in spite of Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo’s free education policy covering every child resident in Anambra State, irrespective of where they come from, parents still unleash their children and wards to go and beg on the streets of Awka, capital of Anambra State, and other commercial urban areas. There is absolutely no reason why these kids shouldn’t be in schools instead of milling under Aroma flyover and our other city centres in seeming vagrancy.
This is a smear on Governor Soludo’s sustained effort to regenerate our major cities and urban centres. The push to modernize our cities can hardly succeed with the influx of mendicant kids sponsored by parents and syndicates littering the sidewalks and constituting niggly nuisance.
The modus operandi is that the older ones lurk in the corners, waiting for the proceeds coming from the children who had gone to beg for alms.
Parents and syndicates who send these minors to go and beg for them on the streets must be reminded that there is a law prohibiting child begging and prostitution and so on.
Henceforth, a more coordinated action would be taken by relevant government agencies to get to the root of the matter so that an effective stop will be put to it.
The children deserve to be in the schools enjoying the free education guaranteed by Governor Soludo instead of being on the streets, begging for alms they eventually give to the adults.
*Paul Nwosu PhD*
Commissioner for Information
Anambra State.