Lagos street kids: Tales of dying dreams

Street kids are walking tornadoes that are badly battered and brutalised yet they are full of hope for a better tomorrow writes FUNKE ADETUTU

It's 10a.m this sunny Friday morning. The quietness of the Kuramo water front creates a sharp contrast with the usual bustling activities characteristic of this seaside in the evenings. Rusty iron carts litter a greater part of the expansive space at the entrance of the beach. A white coloured truck is parked few meters away. Young boys and middle aged men mill around it for no particular reason, it seems.
"Good morning, you need a seat?" a young man by the name Friday walked up to me waving. Before Friday could finish with his question, another young man, Benson walked up to me seeking for my patronage. Friday and Benson are only two of many young men who make a living by sourcing for customers for the tent owners and pepper soup sellers by the beach side. This is what they call the Waiting business.
With the aid of both men, I moved towards the entrance of the Kuramo beach where two men are seated collecting the N100 toll fare. "That's what they do for a living," Friday tells me. "I thought I could take you in without you paying."
As expected, the beachside is very quite at this hour of the morning. The only audible sound is that of the waves hitting the sea shore. The white plastic chairs that are usually arranged around the tables upwardly are now leaning against the circular shaped tables. It's a sign that at this hour business is far from starting until evening when the regular callers at the beach stroll in for a plate of pepper soup or two.
As I discuss with Benson, I noticed some teenage boys bent double by the weight of the load they are carrying walk pass. Their slim necks look too frail to bear the weight of the loads they are carrying. They do this on a daily basis.
"What are they carrying," I ask Benson in amazement. "It's usually pure water or ice block sold by the tent owners," he explains. It's shocking to discover that they are only paid a meagre sum of N50 for carrying such heavy loads.
Kuramo is a place where many young boys in their teens and early 20s have come to call home. They sleep under the cabin erected by the tent owners. Numbering about 250, these boys survive mainly on the pittance they earn from the menial jobs they do. Life in a shanty by a seaside like Kuramo could be really hard for a young boy like 15 year-old Dayo. He used to live at the Iwo Road Motor Park in Ibadan before he was lured to Lagos by a friend of his age. "My friend just asked me if I have ever been to Lagos," he recalls. "I answered no. He told me he would take me to Lagos."
The thought of going to the mega city of Lagos must have sparked something in the imagination of little Dayo but unknown to him, the hazardous life he was exposed to in Ibadan still continues in Lagos which could be more biting and brutal than that of Ibadan. Of course, his first point of call was Oshodi Motor Park before he migrated to Kuramo. This morning, in the scorching sun, as Dayo walks barefooted on the hot beach sand, he draws the image of an unknown man on a torn piece of Peak Milk carton. The folds of flesh on his fore head, caused by the heavy luggage he carries daily, make him look older than his age. Dayo could not recall the last time he saw his father yet he looks content and happy with his present state perhaps he has no choice but to be.
"He has just gone to deliver some bags of pure water to someone," Morufu Suratu, the co-ordinators of the boys tells me. Suratu has been living at Kuramo for 30 years. He moved to Kuramo few days after he was relieved of his job as a trailer driver for an unnamed company. He lives in one of the huts built with rusty corrugated iron sheets by the coastline.
Boys like Dayo have been forced to abandon their homes to live on the streets for different reasons. Daily, they walk the streets in search of what to eat or do to earn a living at such tender age. These destitutes are exposed to harsh weather conditions, malnutrition and those who hawk on the street have been knocked down several times by fast moving vehicles. Some of them who live at Kuramo engage in fraudulent activities, they smoke, drink and prostitute. These are habits they learnt from the night life common at the beach.
The story of 32-year-old Benson Adeniyi who has been living at the Kuramo beach since his teenage years is instructive. He abandoned his job as a fraudster to join the growing number of boys at Kuramo. "I used to live in Ghana and Lome until I returned to Nigeria few years ago. I was engaged in fraud while in Ghana. My clients were mainly white people," he explains in Queen's English. His command of English is quite surprising and he says he picks his English from the street. Even though he still resides at Kuramo, Adeniyi claims he has turned a new leave and he hopes for a better tomorrow. He is now into Afro gospel music and he plans to release his album soon.
Most of these boys are forced to run away from home for varying reasons. Some abandoned their homes because their parents or guardian are taking forceful measures to correct them whenever they go wrong. Others are orphaned at an early age with no relative to run to, while some others live with their parents yet they find life on the street fulfilling since they are able to contribute to the family's economy. These are children who became destitute as a result of poor economic family condition.
"At Iwaya, the community don't think they have street children," explains Gustavo Adolfo Molina, a native of Guatamela in Latin America who is currently on a five year project for Human Development Right Initiative, an NGO based at Onike, Lagos. They believe street kids are only those who are homeless. Yet they have kids who roam the street. Most of the families in this community don't have enough economic resources to bring up the kids. Therefore, they depend on their kids who engage in street trading to improve the economy. As early as 10 am, these kids roam the streets when they are supposed to be in school."
Aside this, countless children are trained by parents to become learned in the trade of begging. There are some who have taken to begging for their source of livelihood and the parents do not see anything wrong with this. It's saddening to discover that these kids deliver the pittance they make daily to their parents who sit under a shelter while they toil in the hot sun moving from car to car, begging. The real child beggars are from the north explains Marion Sikuade, executive director, Child Life-Line, a non governmental organisation that caters for street kids. They are not indigenous to the south at all and they see begging as a normal way of life.
"I remember many years ago going to a village near Kano," says Sikuade. "The village was near a big dam and we interviewed the wives of the Imam of the village. There were two Imams. We just went to one house. He showed us around the house. It's pitiable what the scarcity of goods they have in the house. There was a small girl who was blind. And she was then about nine years old and the wives told us quite frankly how well she was nearly old enough to go out and beg. And she would be sent on the street to beg and that will be the end of it. They will have to do that. This was rather shocking but it just bears out the contention that in the north they accept begging as a way of life."
The Almajerees see begging as a way of life and it is a system that is as old as the world. In this system, parents would handover their small children of about six, seven years old to a learned man, a Mallam, a teacher and he would take them to some urban centre where he would teach them the Koran. "They will learn the entire Koran by heart but they didn't learn much else and they had to go out to beg for their food. It is a very, very old institution, I mean they are common in, for example, India," says Sikuade.
Unfortunately, the Almajeree institution has been deteriorating very badly and it has become a way for lazy men to survive on children's labour. In the north, the Mallams go through the villages and parents give their small sons to them to be taken to an urban centre where they would be taught so that one day they will become Mallams themselves. "You may ask why do parents hand over their children to these wandering Mallams? And the answer, of course, is these people are dead poor. They have many mouths in the family to feed. So, I think again it boils down to the old issue of poverty. It is poverty that drives people to beg and it is poverty that makes people hand over their children in the north to the Almajerees."
The sad thing is that these children grow up but they are not taught any form of trade or craft with which they can support themselves as they grow up. And this is one of the reasons why in the north and even in a place like Lagos, it is very easy to work up riot because these Almajerees, the teenage ones, have no trade, they have no jobs and they are not trained in any way or in any thing. And of course, they are always ready for anything that will earn them little money.
Based on his experience of working with Archbishop Taylor Memorial School, a government owned school at Victoria Island, Barry Phipps, a secondary counsellor at the American International school of Lagos, agrees with Molina that most parents of these kids on the street are pleased that their boys are on the street.
"I have met their families. I have met their fathers and mothers. I have met their uncles and aunties and I have been to their villages. But they are happy for their boys to be on the street. It's not just a government problem. It's a social problem in that people don't take responsibility as a father, a parent. They are happy for someone else to do this for them," he says.
Molina's and Phipps' views reinforce the fact that the family plays a prominent role in the development and upbringing of a child. Phipps believes that street kids are on the increase because some parents would not be responsible for a child who is a product of the sexual relationship they've had.
"Where we are at the moment, there are so many boys on the streets. Each one of these boys has a father, mother, an uncle or aunty," he says. But they allow them to live on the street and these boys chose to live on the street. Something is going wrong with how the families bring up their child, how they take responsibility for the upbringing of the child. Boys of 13 should not be living home. Boys of 12 should not be thinking of living at Kuramo beach as a better option. Something is wrong with the society if 10, 11, 12 year-olds are choosing to live on the street rather than living at home. And that is my concern."
There are kids who flee their homes due to excessive beatings they receive from their parents such is the case of 13-year-old Dayo Akintomide who was transferred from the Ebunoluwa Foundation to the Child Life-line Centre at Ikorodu. He fled his uncle's home in Akure when he was nine years-old and he was picked up from the street with his younger sister whose where about he does not know.
"I ran away from my uncle's place because he was maltreating me," he says with pains in his voice as he paints repeated patterns on a drawing sheet. "I was picked up by someone who took me to the remand home in Akure. I have been at Child Life-line for some years." Today, Akintomide is a JSS One student at one of the schools at Ikorodu. He is good at painting and one of his works won a prize at school.
"There are at least some few small boys who for one reason or the other have run away from home mostly from beatings," explains Sikuade. And they go on the street to beg because they are too small to work nobody will offer them anything. So they just have to beg. But it is not often, it's very rare. You will find out that in some areas where there are many of the street children some boys will take on a little boy and look after him."
The problem is every child that is on the street tries to work his way to eat. The hazards that these boys are exposed to remains unquantifiable and they are all sort of laboured. Looking at these boys roam the streets, they all look useless but the actual fact is if one could give them a home, put a roof over their head, teach them a trade or send them to school to learn, they will become transformed beings.
The pains and psychological trauma that they go through is visible in the faces of all the boys I discussed with. Most of them wish to be reunited to their parents but more often than not this seems impossible. "These boys need the assistance of a psychologist. When I say psychologist, I'm not referring to a clinical psychologist, I mean someone who would be ready to counsel them. Their cure is not medical and it does not require any medicine. They need love and care," says Molina.
Phipps on the other hand believes the trauma the children go through is relative. "Yes, some kids may be traumatised by some things but these boys all they want is love, they want to be accepted. These boys I have, I have been working with some of them now for six months and they are working hard. I see them smile; laugh and they try to put all these pains behind them. They are not traumatised by sitting down and feeling sorry for themselves. They are not complaining or saying that life is tough for them. They wanted to be accepted and be able to take hold of what they can get."
The challenge before the society therefore is how to teach these destitutes how to maximise the opportunity that they have got. They need to be taught how to become good fathers and mothers so that the cycle will not continue.
"And if we want to stop this cycle we've got to teach them how to be responsible people in the family and to be democratic. We must learn to teach them how to respect and listen to each other," Phipps adds.