omg! Sorry tales of Nigerian kids living on the streets

Kids hawking in traffic

Across the nation’s states, there is a class of children who neither feel good nor happy. Their outlook paints a vivid picture of their state of helplessness.

They appear unkempt and totally hopeless regarding their future. In their tattered clothes, they find homes in the most filthy and awkward places like abandoned buildings, under overhead bridges and school premises. Usually, they retire to these “abodes” at dusk and dash out early in the morning before the prying eyes of security agents or the rightful owners of the structures turn out for business.

Holding a bottle of...

water mixed with little soap, another detergent in one hand and an improvised brush  in the other, he walks up to a car in traffic uninvited, and begins to wash its windscreen, hoping the car owner or driver would be compassionate enough to give him some money.

 At the other end of the road, a teenage girl of school age hawks oranges when she should ordinarily be in the classroom.
Yet, there are others whose only source of livelihood  is begging for alms. These ones approach you with words that will soften any heart. In that brief encounter of  less than one minute, they will tell you the grief  they have been passing through.

Welcome to the lives of Nigeria’s street kids! They seem uncovered by the Nigerian constitution which clearly spells out in Section 34, sub-section 1c that “no person shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.” Many of them, indeed, are “forced” to perform “compulsory labour.”

And because “pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in this world is done by children” . As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, these needy children make no pretences about their poor state  nor would  they conceal the hardship they had been made to endure.

However, there are  some among them who turn to odd  jobs and use the proceeds to train themselves in schools or to start off a trade.

Their reasons for resorting to living off the street are common: abject poverty, battle to survive, being deceived to come to the cities for non-existent  jobs and/or househelps pushed to hawk or into the streets by their host families.

Culled - Vanguard

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