The Daily Graphic last week Saturday carried a story at its front page about children who have besieged the streets of Accra begging for alms. This is not the first time the paper has carried such a story. A year ago, the state-owned paper published a similar story that drew the attention of the authorities to the looming danger.
Though the paper quoted the numerous steps the Department of Social Welfare has taken to address the issue, The Chronicle is still not convinced that the problem is properly being addressed.It is undeniable fact that the majority of these street begging children are not Ghanaians . They are mostly Nigerians, Nigerians, Malians and other West African nationals.
Information we are picking, which we believe may be available to the National Security Secretariat, is that because our economy is performing better than the countries we have just mentioned, it has become a lucrative business for businessmen to transport these children and their parents to Ghana to beg for alms.
We have always used to this column to argue that though the protocol of Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) allows the free movement of persons among member states, it does mean that people should be abused from one country to the other for economic reasons.
Unfortunately, because Ghana considers herself more catholic than the Pope, we are allowing these businessmen and women transport these beggars and dump them on us. Regrettably, it is only few foreigners visiting our country who would recognise these children and mothers as non-Ghanaians. The rest would automatically assume that they are all Ghanaians who have flooded our streets harassing people for money.
We seem to be joking with fire because should these non-Ghanaian children and their mothers be carrying any contagious diseases, it will be easy for them to spread it in Ghana. Again, since some of these children and their mothers are coming from war ravaged countries, it would be easy for them to to be radicalised and cause mayhem in future.
We are entertaining this fear because these children are not being given any formal education – meaning they would grow up to become vagabonds and cause all manner of societal problems for the country.
Our information is that these beggars were on the streets of Abidjan doing similar business – begging for alms – but the Ivorian authorities rounded them up and sent them back to the countries they came from. The Ivorian authorities were forward looking and saw the dangers ahead of them, hence, the action they took.
The Chronicle is aware that somewhere last year, the Ministry of Gender and Social Protection rounded up these children and their mothers and sent them to the Nigerian Embassy in Accra for onward repatriation. But because we as a country were interested in the arrest and not the repatriation, the Nigerian Embassy released their compatriots who have come back to the streets. Interestingly, none of the officials the Graphic reporter spoke to admitted that the beggars are mostly non-Ghanaian.
What these officials from the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) and Korley Klottey Municipal Assembly are interested in are the services they intend to render to these children.
They are not concerned about the busing of foreigners into our country to beg for money. If we have the resources to take care of children from other countries, then we call on these authorities to extend similar services to Ghanaian children in all parts of the country.
Go to our various communities and you realise that because of abject poverty, most of our children are not in school. Should these children also be transported to Accra before we see the need in attending to their plights? We are not prophets of doom, but the nation can be assured that should these benevolence from the AMA and Korley Klottey assembly continue, more of these children from foreign countries are going to flood our streets begging for money.
Ghana should not be bearing the brunt of policy failures our sister countries and also serving as refugee camps for citizens fleeing the harsh economic conditions. We have our problems that we are grappling with, and this should be utmost concern, and not the other way round.
Source: The Chronicle
