By Femi Ayodele
The other day, I was on my way home from shopping when some random guy came into my line of vision. He beckoned to me and started to demand that I give him money. I did not respond; I did not stop walking. He, too, did not stop walking or quit talking. Somewhere along the few steps we took together, the content of his speech changed: he had started to curse at me, or more accurately, at my mother.
My female companion, born and bred in Agege, cut him off with a look. She might have engaged him if I didn’t pull her away.
As I think about this almost benign incident, it comes to me as a marker of a not-so-old Lagos metonym. Make no mistakes; we have always had beggars in Lagos. But they were often old and sincerely destitute – sometimes from up country and maybe neighbouring countries. But my assailant was young, not infirm, virile and Yoruba. Here is an arguable fact, Yoruba people do not beg. They may be area boys, touts, louts, cultists but they do not beg. When, then, did this new ethos take root? That we have a crop of young Nigerians, able-bodied, who parade every corner demanding money or other belongings with such a brazen sense of entitlement. When did it become a norm that one had to possess a certain level of braggadocio to walk around in broad daylight?
Of organised things, Lagos has always been home to organisation. Organised government, organised religion outlets, organised crime and now, organised begging. On every major road on the mainland, you are likely to find somebody with some grotesque body part – maybe a swollen stomach or a disproportionate head or inflamed genitals, sitting in full few of work goers with a megaphone beside him playing Prospa Ochimana’s Ekweme, while somebody, holds a blue metal-rimmed offering bag and flex printed image of the infirm fellow. Better to see the problem in larger than life-size, if you refuse to look at it in 3d. The elaborate props – the megaphones, the flex banners, the handlers – give away the beggars’ sense of organisation.
These people who hold these flex banners and offering bags, who are they? Is their choice of Ekweme – with its slow drawn out acoustics and appeal to immanence – a means of guilt-tripping passers-by to part with their money? Does it strike anyone as curious that these people with body deformities seem to be on a shift, rotating their stations? Perhaps, they get paid like the child-beggars who sang for Surdas in The Slumdog Millionaire!
An interesting story broke on Twitter recently. A young man was trying to get to Surulere from Costain at 1pm on a weekday, and he kept hearing calls of Nigga wa, Nigga Duro – meaning Nigger come, Niger wait. It took him a while to realise it was a masquerade begging him for money. That tweet generated responses, and one particular response was from a woman who had had the same experience. While the original tweet had been inconclusive and ended with the word ‘Lagos,’ and a laughing emoji, her own story had ended with being forcibly dispossessed of her belongings by those masquerades – beings who traditional Yoruba culture believe have come from heaven.
Different versions of this masquerade begging play out in all parts of Lagos. Sometimes, it is a young child dressed in masques, followed by adults going about begging for money. Sometimes, it is a baby, carried in the hands of adults. Sometimes, it is a full-grown man (they are always mostly men) who dons a masque and goes about begging people, sometimes bullying them out of their money.
The gender dynamics of these young beggars is interesting to watch. The males often go about with the typical manly brash, square shouldered look, as if they had your choice in their pocket. The women often seem weak. They stop you on the corner and plead with you, telling you about their journey from some far-off place and how they are stranded. Some of them have children. And there is a variety who dress gorgeously, oozing sex appeal.
Lagosians pay for everything: light, transport and even a hole one digs in the ground for his own hydration and sustenance. Now, Lagosians are being made to pay for the sicknesses, prayers and indolence of others. It is wrong that young people, virile as they are, are pushed to the point of beggary so much they lose hope and dignity. It is wrong that one needs a measure of braggadocio to just walk in broad daylight. It is sordid that the beggars of the daytime often become the pickpockets of the evening crowd and, if they get desperate enough, armed robbers at night. It is bad that people who genuinely need help are usually passed over because they are not discernible from the charlatans. It is interesting that between being a no man’s land and an everyman’s land, Lagos has now become the land of the strong.
Perhaps, the government might do something about it, maybe open a functional facility for the truly destitute and take the mats from beneath the people who might be fleecing them. Perhaps the government would create more jobs and opportunity for the teeming population that constantly roam the state. Perhaps the government will ensure that there is better policing to safeguard well-meaning people. But while they are at it, you need to keep safe. You need to speak with a strong voice and defend yourself and your possession. You must remember that Fela said that on Monday morning, Lagos will take no foolishness.
- Ayodele writes from Lagos.
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