We need to restore order on city’s streets

Anyone in Nairobi who often crosses Kenyatta Avenue at the junction with Kimathi Street late in the evening must be familiar with a woman in a trademark black buibui whose primary business, it seems, is to accost and harass pedestrians to force them to hand over alms.

The woman has colonised that spot for the past few months. Many a passerby who have become accustomed to her wily ways have learnt to wave away her brazen overtures.

The persistence and raw aggression with which she relentlessly pursues her victims can be quite unsettling. To put it mildly, this able-bodied buibui-clad woman has become a public nuisance.
Unfortunately, she is not an isolated case in the city. Walking on Nairobi streets, you will run into many beggars and street urchins.

If it is not the occasional chap “just released from prison” and fundraising for bus fare to his rural home, then it is that horde of foul-mouthed women with infants strapped on their backs.

There is also a band of youngsters barely into their teens you are sure to bump into selling peanuts and who are adept at begging — nay pestering — pedestrians and motorists to buy their wares at ungodly hours.

The worst-case scenario is an encounter with the dreaded faeces-touting, glue-sniffing street boys who have no qualms about coercing their victims — especially women — to part with a small fortune.

UNDER SIEGE

Many Nairobians can be forgiven for feeling that they are under siege from all sorts of layabouts who have no business being in the central business district in the first place.

While a few of these are genuine destitutes, most of these vagabonds are mere fronts for a thriving microenterprise that feeds off the benevolence — or perhaps ignorance — of the Kenyan psyche.

Streets flooded by beggars is not a uniquely Nairobi, or Kenyan, problem. A story is told of how Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin Dada once had beggars on the streets of Kampala rounded up, packed into a tipper, and offloaded into Lake Victoria. In Dubai, the authorities are reported to mop up the streets in an annual anti-begging ritual at the onset of the holy month of Ramadhan.

Although the Ugandan case — myth or fact — is an extreme case of dealing with beggars, there is clearly a need to address this issue.

This problem cannot be purely a case of regression and failure on the part of those in authority. A few years ago, when the National Rainbow Coalition took power, then minister for Home Affairs — and later Vice-President — Moody Awori managed to rehabilitate a number of street children.

This programme was one of the key successes of the short-lived Narc government. Now a decade later, the street population is back in full force, threatening to take over the city even as Governor Evans Kidero’s county government looks the other way and pretends that these people do not exist.

The writer is a sub-editor with the Daily Nation. [email protected]