Last Wednesday, I was accosted by a lady whose good breeding was hidden behind her shrivelled and dirty appearance. I found out that she had lived better days only when she spoke to me. But we didn’t have a conversation. It was quite late, and I was in a hurry to get home. At any rate, she was not asking for a conversation. She needed money to buy food for her children. The disconnect between her appearance and her diction tugged painfully at my heart. Even though I didn’t have much to give, what little I was able to do lit up her face and made it a bit better for me as I drove away.
When I shared this story on Facebook, I was surprised to find as much as four distinct reactions from my e-friends.
The first group confidently asserted that I had been scammed by a con artist. They stated without ambiguity that able-bodied street beggars were scammers. Their reason? You would find them at the same corner tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, changing their sob stories and continuing their hunt for “victims,” I was told. It was a curious argument to make. First of all, they didn’t even bother to discriminate among the beggars. What sealed the argument for them was simply the fact that they never take themselves off the streets but must return, day after day, with the same or improved sob stories. This implied that, in their estimation, a day or even a week’s proceeds should have been enough to take any honest beggar off the streets!
Driving this standpoint was something else I found and which I shall share shortly.
The second group took a biblical view of the matter by rebuking me. They frowned at the idea of making public the fact that I gave alms. Christ, they said, clearly disapproved of such behaviour. Christianity prescribes that the best form of charity is one that is given in secret, without fanfare and without expecting gratitude. Don’t I know that this is the surest way to build divine goodwill and gain salvation? I exaggerate a little, of course, but this was the summary of their position. It did not matter to them that the story I shared was an observation of my worry about a growing army of panhandlers on our streets these days and that, at any rate, I never disclosed the value of the charity that I offered to the lady.
A third group said the story exposed something they had hitherto missed about beggars in general and street beggars in particular. It became apparent to them that they have been missing every opportunity to do good by these beggars. By adopting the attitude of the first group, they had indiscriminately labelled every panhandler on the street as deplorable, leaving no room for the possibility that there could be genuine cases of need among them. As one of them, a good friend of mine, summed it up, if someone has to give, will it matter if the street beggar who receives it were a con artist? And will one become poor by giving even to someone who turns out to be undeserving?
A fourth group, in response to the third, declared flatly that every panhandler we see on the streets, fake or not, is an economically challenged person in need of assistance. The decent ones among them, such as the lady I had the encounter with, have powerful needs that drove them to the streets. As one put it, it takes extraordinary courage to subordinate one’s self-esteem in order to publicly advertise one’s poverty status through street begging.
Curiously, I found that, no matter how the issues were presented by the third and fourth schools of thought that quickly developed around the subject, the first group remained unyielding. A couple of other persons joined in to amplify their position, cast me as not being street smart and continued to teach me what I might have forgotten about the Christian precepts on almsgiving. It suddenly dawned on me that these e-friends were actually coordinated in their responses, as if they were perhaps trying to prevent something else from happening with what I shared. This “something else,” it turned out, was the possibility of my encounter becoming a peg to criticize the government of the day.
Rather than get angry with them, I actually sympathized with the first group on its confused position. It is easy to plot a nexus between a growing beggar population in a country and faithful execution of public policies, whether at federal or at state levels. And this is not a peculiar Nigerian phenomenon. Failure to effectively challenge insurrections in different countries displaces citizens from their primary means of earning income and distributes them between the streets and IDP camps. If any IDP camp is consequently mismanaged, more of the vulnerable population spills onto the streets to look for how to make ends meet. Also, a drastic fall in government revenue in most developing countries automatically disrupts the economy, with consequences that reverberate even in the private sector. The lady that I encountered last week could easily have been a banker displaced in the gale of job cuts that swept through the formal sector as big corporate players restructured for survival, following fall in oil prices.
The first group, however, fails to realise that not all cases we see on the streets can be directly or indirectly traced to policy failures. We can mention three of them. In Nigeria, the almajiri system is a cultural aberration that throws people into the streets to beg. The only natural catastrophe that Nigeria experiences is perennial flooding, and this not only displaces but has in the past also forced a few displaced persons on to the streets. Long before Boko Haram and ISWAP, we did have inter- and intra-communal violence that led to people rushing to the streets for survival.
The group also fails to realise that the people paying them to challenge innocuous social media postings are the real culprits, not President Muhammadu Buhari that they want to protect. These are policymakers that won’t bat an eyelid to spend hundreds of millions of naira to clear grass at, rather than use it to feed inmates of, IDP camps. It also includes those who distribute billions of naira to Nigeria’s vulnerable citizens with such speed and efficiency that citizens are dazed as they demand to know who benefitted among themselves!
Beyond the misguided position of the first group, there are two powerful lessons that I took away from all of this. These have nothing to do with what the French call “grande verités.”
One: Behind most eyes that stare at us on the streets pleading for financial assistance are powerful, intense and heartbreaking stories of need. The needs come in various degrees and activate desperate measures to fill them. And, just like every other pursuit in life, some will design better marketing tactics to tug at the heartstrings and unlock our wallets faster than others.
Two: When you give and tomorrow discover that the fellow is still soliciting – and possibly using the same or more creative sob story – the implication is not that he or she is a scammer. It shows clearly, as we all know, that we have not taught the able-bodied among them how to fish so that they can leave the streets.
Nothing stops anyone of us who is blessed from teaching able-bodied beggars how to fish, individually, through a group, or by launching a funding campaign. People are already doing it; it’s not rocket science.
God bless all the decent men and women of action who have been quietly championing this noble cause in their unique, unobtrusive and effective ways.