Tuesday 15 January 2013

30% Of Children In Northern Nigeria Are Street Beggars


Thirty per cent of children in the North are street beggars, the Dean of Post-Graduate School, Nigerian Defence Academy, Professor Adam Okene, has said.

Okene also stated that recent research showed that the North-west geo-political zone of the country accounts for 70% of the number of almajirai in the country, most of whom depend on street begging to survive.

Speaking as the chairman of a workshop on street begging in Niger state, organised by the Niger state Law Reform Commission, Okene called for synergy among state governors in the northern part of the country to eradicate the problem of alamajiri and street begging which he said has been accounting for the series of security breaches in this part of the country.

Okene explained that Malaysia and Thailand had worked the path the north is presently toeing but with diligence and political will the two countries had been able to surmount the problem.

He said that more emphasis must be placed on reforms in the North and the country as a whole, insisting that proper education of the citizenry and applicable education will solve the problems the country is presently facing.

While supporting the reform agenda of the Niger state government, Okene said “we need the reform because we have to solve the problems and challenges of the society”.

Delivering a paper titled “Street Begging, Causes and Remedies: An Islamic Perspective”, Dr Ibrahim Husam Imam, Head of Department of Languages, Nigeria Defence Academy, Kaduna, said that the problems of street begging cannot be resolved without the involvement of Qur’anic teachers who need assistance from government and non-governmental organisations to keep their discipline off the streets.

He stressed the need to set up a committee to train Islamic teachers on the management of almajirai while government should also pursue the integration of the Arabic and western education policy with more vigour

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