Promoting future thuggery through charity

By SALAMATA CHISAMBI*, CORRESPONDENT
Since time immemorial, there have been calls by government, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development partners to remove children from the streets and find them a better place to live in.
Street-children or, indeed, beggars are the least people I want to see each time I go for shopping. Not that I am stingy with my money, but I have two reasons I hold such hatred towards street-beggars.
I don’t think begging can be the solution to our socio-economic problems. Again, I always feel a street is not the best place where one can do his or her charity work.

In my thinking, the best way to approach these children is to adopt one of them and raise at home.
In July 2008, executive director of Step Kids Awareness (Steka) Godknows Maseko left Malawi for South Africa via Mozambique on a bicycle to raise awareness on the plight of street children.
MultiChoice Malawi was one of the partners that sponsored Maseko’s bicycle trip to the rainbow nation. Before riding off, this child rights activist told the media that the plight of street children will not be over until people who claim to be good Samaritans stop their practice.
According to Maseko, the giving of alms to vulnerable children on the roads only exacerbates the situation on the ground. I could not agree more on this issue.
Many Malawians believe there is nothing wrong and that it is being considerate when you give a coin to a child on the street. But what people need to know is that the tendency that we call benevolence on the street has a bad repercussion in the end.
For starters, I would like to remind Malawians that most of the young children gracing our streets are not there out of choice. It is problems that drive them onto the street for survival.
Each and every human being desires to lead a life minus crises and hardships. But without invitation, crises will always come into our lives. The deadly HIV and Aids pandemic has only added salt to a festering wound as it has increased the number of orphans in the country.
While appreciating that not all the children begging on our road pavements are parentless, the fact remains that the majority of them are victims of HIV and Aids after losing their beloved parents to the killer disease.
Life on the street is not all that rosy that we can conclude that by assisting them with the little cash we give out while passing by will ease their suffering. The problem of street children needs more than our ‘street-benevolence’. It is more than the generosity we do portray on the roads to end the suffering of the child on the streets.
No one can appreciate the suffering children go through on the roads until they experience it. When you see them on the street, do not assume that they are happy. They are there because their bellies need to be filled at a time when their houses are clean of any foodstuff. They would like to sleep under good beddings when their uncles grabbed the property left by parents.
Children on the streets also desire to lead a decent life, but fail to manage to achieve their desire because they lack human and material support. It is not the coin we give them that these children need when they are on the street. Their appearance may speak louder than words: “Njala bwana! Tithandizeni yaufa, bwana!”
They need clothes, shelter, food and protection. They need to go to school only if you can provide them motherly and fatherly care which they miss a lot after losing parents. Children on the street need education, too, to become what they would like to be when they grow up. They need more than the coins or banknotes you can give.
Unfortunately, many of us think street children were born to be on the street and that we are their ‘daily street—providers’. By giving them the coins, we are simply assuring them of our continued support on condition that they should be on the street. And that is feeding or fertilising the problem—not rooting it out. In this case, we are not solving the problem, but just nursing it.
But the problem, though, is that when these children grow into adults with their street-life, they usually become notorious criminals in the society because we did not care at first. They will be faced with responsibility to provide for their own lives even when they have no means and that will drive them into burglary, theft and robbery.
It is sad that people are quick to criticise the police for lawlessness in the society when they do not want to deal with the problem while it is still in infancy. Sometimes I wonder when I hear people talk about being a human rights activist when they cannot see that children on the street have rights too, which need to be protected with or without their parents.
The problem I note is that many people choose to come in when the problem gets out of hand. The best way to assist is not to give them, but to find means of housing them, provide for them their needs so that they may go back to school.
Is it not surprising when people criticise government for doing nothing on the problem of street children? We have business tycoons in this country, who among them can tell the nation a contribution they have made to lessen the plight of street children? I bet nobody can come forward.
Yet there are many Malawians playing generous people to orphans on the streets by throwing useless coins to the children as we drive by. That is not helpful. Let us find a lasting solution to the problem. Otherwise, we should not criticise the police for lawlessness in our societies because we have chosen to nurture future criminals.
We have chosen to feed our own assailants. We shall always have the problem of children begging on the street until we stop being ‘street benefactors’.