Abuja repatriates 217 ‘vagabonds’ to Delta, Kano, Imo, others
- ‘Repatriated street beggars from Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, Jigawa,
Kano, Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Abia, Imo, Delta refused to learn skills after arrest, profiling’
By Luminous Jannamike, Abuja
ON a hot and humid morning in Abuja, a convoy of white buses rolls into the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Vocational and Rehabilitation Centre Bwari. But this is no ordinary visit.
The vehicles are there to evacuate 217 street beggars and destitute to their states of origin, as part of the FCT Administration’s plan to rid the city of human and environmental nuisance.
“This is not fair! We have nowhere to go!” murmurs a middle-aged man with scraggy beard and tattered black clothes. “Why are they doing this to us?” he adds.
But the officials overseeing the evacuation have no time for complaints. They are determined to rid the city of human and environmental nuisance caused by homeless individuals.
For months, the FCT has been grappling with the challenge of managing the growing number of homeless people in the city. The situation has become dire, with beggars and vagabonds setting up makeshift shelters on the street corners and posing a security risk.
The FCT Administration has set up the Vocational and Rehabilitation Center in Bwari to train and equip these individuals with skills to help them become self-sufficient, but many of them refused to learn.
“You were given the opportunity to learn a trade and become self-sufficient. But you chose to be untrainable”, one of the officials, whose voice rises above the murmurings of the crowd, says.
“You refused to learn skills that could have helped you improve your lives. Now, you have to face the consequences of your actions”.
‘Untrainable vagabonds’
Affirming the position of the officials who storm the Center for the evacuation, the Director, Department of Social Welfare Services, FCT Administration’s Social Development Secretariat, Sani Amar-Rabe, says the evacuees are indeed “untrainable vagabonds and street boys” who deliberately refused to learn skills after their arrests and profiling.
“Some of them showed no interest in learning vocational skills. They only showed interest to be out and about and have the liberty to continue in their destitution”, he told Sunday Vanguard.
“But those who have a good mindset embraced skills acquisition for empowerment have been enrolled in different skills acquisition programmes here at the Centre.
“We don’t have many; they are just 217 beggars and street boys that are to be repatriated mostly to Katsina, Kaduna, Niger, Jigawa, Kano, Zamfara, Sokoto and Kebbi states.
“And this time around we have some from Abia, Imo and Delta states.
“What we noticed from some of the destitute and beggars as well is that they consider the FCT safer and economically viable especially those from the North-West and North-East.
“So, people from these zones move to Abuja for survival and some of them, we discovered that begging and destitution has become an attitude to them.
“The street boys that constitute menace and defaced the Federal Capital City, some of whom at a particular point in time, manifest into another threat to the security of the residents especially those that do sleep under bridges claiming to be destitute but most of them are criminals”.
According to him, their stubbornness had frustrated the government’s efforts to help them, leaving no option but to send them back to their states of origin.
Meanwhile, the evacuation exercise was not short of drama as some of the evacuees were unwilling to move, insisting that they had nowhere to go and no means of survival.
Others pleaded for mercy, but their pleas fell on deaf ears. The officials were resolute in their decision to rid the FCT of the nuisance caused by homeless individuals.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get home,” one of the evacuees, a teenage boy, says in Hausa language, “I left my village when I was a child. I don’t even know if my family is still alive.”
However, as the buses made their way out of the FCT Vocational and Rehabilitation Centre, the evacuees sat quietly, some with a cocktail of anxiety, fear, regret and desperation in their eyes. They knew that they were being sent back to a life of uncertainty and hardship while others were stoic, resigned to their fate.
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