It cannot be missed that Kaduna State is moving by leaps and bounds into a desired future. We must admit that the State Governor Nasiru el Rufa’i did get some crucial change modules right. He first adopted the Treasury Single Account and in one fell swoop, harvested a treasure of hitherto hidden revenue. He it was also that immediately collapsed the Local Government Joint Account, that infamous tool with which some State Governors have held the Local Councils in perpetual bondage. In many ways, Governor el Rufa’i’s policies for Kaduna State force a wish that some of his templates for development and change were applied in an all encompassing fashion for Northern Nigeria where problems faced by Kaduna State are common.
Not one to shy away from a head-on confrontation with oddities, the Governor of Kaduna State announced a decision to ban hawking and begging in the state following a bomb attack that killed 26 innocent citizens and injured 32 persons. el Rufa’i explained that his government was “a responsible government and conscious of its constitutional role to protect citizens and to ensure law and order for common good”. In time, citizens of Kaduna State today rest assured that the move was not “aimed or targeted at the vulnerable group but to protect the people of the State.
In a recent tweet, Nasiru el Rufa’i threatened that “Any child of school age hawking in Kaduna will be asked to show us the parents – who will then be arrested”. Expectedly, the tweet went viral giving force to vibrant discussion on the vexed issue of street hawking by children of school going age, particularly in the North of Nigeria. It is a crying shame that for all these years, Northern States of Nigeria have remained unable to address the challenge of street begging and hawking. The region is worse hit first and foremost because of poverty, added to ignorance, cultural and religious trappings that see child labour as a norm, whereas it has for long been defined as abusive and exploitative. The Millennium Development Goals which had sought to ensure education for the child and eradicate this facet has evidently been a registered failure and Malam Nasiru el Rufa’i is having to resort to coercive measures in order to bring about change that is much needed and clearly for the common good.
In the past, it was a cultural and traditional norm for children to assist their parents make ends meet by engaging in hawking. As a child, I hawked doughnuts around motor parks, construction sites and labour camps and I did so dutifully because I was compelled and told it was obedience to my parents. I was happy to see the joyful gratitude on my mother’s face when evening came, and I returned home with an empty tray, and she counted the money and there was no shortage. I also needed the empty sack of flour which served the purpose of my next boxer shorts. We did not hawk for a reason other than to help out in the home, with parents who believed they were passing their children through some form of discipline. Besides, we schooled week days hawking only after close of school and weekends. Then, life was not as brutish and materialistic as it is today. I have given my mother and the hawking, credit for many of the pitching skills that I have grown to exhibit in later years, which certainly helped my success. I also realise that all of us who engaged in the street hawking for our parents made some success of our lives.
But in those days of humble beginnings, governance made every desired impact. Schools had qualified and dedicated teachers. Education was at Government cost with text and exercise books well funded. School children were even paid pocket-money from the treasury. Local Authorities ensured accountability. The environmental inspectors ensured a clean surrounding and we did not even know that it had a telling effect on health. In any case, the clinics had drugs.
Society has since experienced a great partition between the haves and the have-nots – between the opportune rich and the disadvantaged poor. Only the children of the poor have-nots engage in street hawking. Children of the opportune of the same age as those of the poor get taken to extra lessons, religious classes, parks and confectionaries for ice cream and cupcakes. Consciously, we have been daily engaged in widening a gap across which fly even in our time, and sadly in years to come, arrows and rockets of hate and frustration fuelled by political charlatans who divide and rule only to further enlarge the divide as they appropriate public resource only to themselves. The example set by Nasiru el Rufa’i therefore stands out visibly as a marked pacesetter.
It is necessary however to address the challenge wholly to include the fact of over 9 million school age children being out of school in Northern Nigeria. This must be seen as one of the North’s biggest tragic challenges deserving equally dramatic emergency engagement by all Northern Governors. Hard as it is to agree, we must see hawking by school-age children as child labour and denial of opportunity for education as a human right. We must see street begging by school-age children also in the same light. For society to move forward, the practices must be outlawed, with particularly primary and secondary education, made free and compulsory. There are as well, empowerment modules that can provide succour to our folks as a palliative that can close the gap, and should be universally adopted. A social security law backed by political commitment and Government funding can provide workable cushions for abjectly poor and vulnerable groups effectively. Kaduna State may have begun a systematic address of the challenge comprehensively but success in Kaduna only puts fine colour on an ugly global picture. Hence the wish that all Northern Governors apply the El Rufa’i Kaduna State template with modifications that suit peculiar circumstances.
This article was originally published on Daily Trust.
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