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Look at that street child (yes, the one right in front of you); will he ever go to school?

Thursday January 17 2019
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Street children sleep in a trench in Nairobi. We have created zombie communities and lock ourselves behind fortified mansions and gated communities. PHOTO | NMG

By TEE NGUGI

Recently, two local TV stations ran profoundly disturbing documentaries on street families. We have all seen street families in Nairobi’s CBD.

Sometimes, it is a mother nursing an infant. She sends out her other five-year-old child to run after you and beg for 10 shillings.

Other times, groups of mothers sit with their dirty children in a street corner and hope you will pity them and drop a few coins in their outstretched hands. Often, you are approached by a group of boys and girls euphemistically called “parking boys and girls,” a bottle of a glue-based intoxicant on their mouths.

Their ages vary from seven-year-olds to teenagers. They move in a dazed state, zombie like, floating in and out of crowds, or in between traffic, very visible and yet always on the periphery of society. We see these and other variations of street people every day, and yet they seem not to register in our consciousness.

On the days we feel charitable, we drop a few coins in their dirty hands. Sometimes, we become irritable when approached by small children asking for 10 shillings and shoo them away like we do flies.

When we are in a moralising mood, which is often, we shake our heads at street women nursing infants when their other children are hardly four years old. Some of us mutter under our breath: “Ah, the wages of sin…”, and we make a mental note to pray for these sinful fornicating souls at the next church service.

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In church, however, the “Apostle of God,” jumping wildly up and down the podium, reveals that riches are about to come our way and, excited at the prospect of fabulous wealth, we forget to pray for the poor fornicators in street corners.

We do not ask: Where do these street families sleep or what happens when the infants being nursed get sick? Will these five-year-olds pursuing someone for 10 shillings ever go to school? These teenage boys and girls, what kind of adults will they become? And important: What are the consequences of an ever-growing population of street people?

There are, of course, a few people who ponder these questions and, by doing so, get moved to do their bit. They feed street children and buy them clothes. Except in the case of philanthropists like Dr Charles Mutua Mulli, founder and director of the Mully Children’s Family homes, these efforts are individual good-Samaritan acts; they are not large-scale and systematic.

The Mully Children’s Family homes, scattered all over the country, house at any given time over 3,000 street children of various ages. At these homes, the children are fed, clothed and given an education. A number of these children have gone on to complete university and enter careers in all manner of fields.

These graduates volunteer their free time to mentor those they left behind at the Mully Homes or render help in other ways. Since dedicating their lives to helping street children, Charles and Esther Mulli have helped over 20,000 children. In 2017, a documentary on the Mully homes was released.

But as extraordinary as the work of the Mullys has been, it can only reach a small fraction of the street children. The documentaries aired on TV depicted a problem that has now reached crisis proportions.

The cameras illuminated dens in the slums where zombie communities lived. It was another world, much like the dens and streets where leper communities in the Middle Ages were abandoned.

In these dens, dark figures in tattered clothes hovered around the TV crew. Others lay almost dead near open sewers. Some stared with expressionless eyes at the camera. Others, high from glue and other drugs, howled like animals.

Those who talked to the crew spoke in a strange halting slurring way, grinning or breaking out into incongruent laughter. It was a peek into an eerie parallel world.

Kenya loses more than a third of its budget every year to corruption. Investigations into the NHIF corruption scandal, for example, revealed how a clerk was able to buy dozens of houses and luxurious cars. Imagine then the lifestyles of the fat cats at the top of the corruption food chain.

If only a fraction of the stolen billions had gone into a systematic programme, devolved across the 47 counties, we would not be rearing a parallel world of zombies.

Like the foolish Abunuwasi happily sawing off the tree branch he is sitting on, we create zombie communities and lock ourselves behind fortified mansions and gated communities.

Morality apart, is it sustainable?

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.

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