Wike’s war on beggars

Each time another minister of the FCT declares yet another war on the beggars in the nation’s capital, I am reminded of Aminata Sow Fall’s famous novel, The Beggars’ Strike. The plot is built around a government that wants to get beggars off the streets so they can effectively promote tourism. The task of ridding the city of beggars falls on Mour Ndiaye, the Director of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene. He develops interest in the post of the vice-president of the country and consults a marabout who tells him he would need to give charity to beggars so the coveted post could be his. The same man who expelled the beggars not only realises how intricately the moral economy of his Islamic society is interwoven with begging, but he must also negotiate with those same beggars who, by now, had realised the powers they wield even as the so-called dregs of the society.

So, the latest man of power to declare an anti-beggar stance is the chief agbèrò of the Bola Tinubu cabinet, Nyesom Wike. On Tuesday, he lamented that Abuja city was turning “into a beggar city” and that “we have declared a war.”  Let us set aside the question of who constitutes the “we” that joined Wike in his declaration of war and ask what his administration intends to do differently from his predecessors who had towed similar paths. He is not the first—and will certainly not be the last—public official who thinks street beggars are an abject nuisance that must be removed by fire by force.

Nigeria is a nation of beggars. We beg everywhere. From the international airports to the streets where uniformed men have mounted their infamous “checkpoints,” begging is routine. People do not just ask for money; they beg for it. Before you can blink an eye, they have given you their bank details to wire them money. It is tempting to think that people beg because they are poor, but then, our leaders too spend the better part of their tenure as beggars. They get into high-priced aircraft to go beg for everything—from money to high-interest loans, foreign aid, foreign investment, attention, and even dignity! Begging is a prerequisite skillset for a leader in this part of the world.

While begging is part of our culture, street beggars are a different beast. According to Wike, “It is embarrassing that people will come in and the first thing they’ll see are just beggars on the road.” Given that beggars are not a strange sight to the average Nigerian, who are the “people” coming into the FCT and whose outsider gaze upon them embarrasses Wike? Let me guess, he must be thinking of his foreign guests for whom the sight of a city overrun with street beggars must be a shocking realization that all the figures of “Nigeria Rising” that government officials peddle around in their search for the precious “foreign investors” to the country must be blatantly false.
Nobody likes beggars, and the mere sight of them stirs visceral impulses. They represent a stubborn reality, the truth of what has not changed despite all our pretenses of economic advance and social empowerment. As fully fleshed, living and breathing subjects, they irritatingly embody a material humanity that cannot be subsumed into the data that can be pompously touted as proof of managerial competence. It is the irreducibility of street beggars to mere abstractions that makes the likes of Wike so strongly resolute to get rid of them. Look at the language he uses, “from next week…we will take them out.” I do not think he was a planning a massacre, but the choice of words is quite telling.

Before he declared a war on beggars, did he pause to ask why and how they keep pouring into the city, or he is just another public official that thinks even a complex problem can be resolved if one applied enough violence? Wike’s immediate predecessor, Muhammad Bello, once also linked beggars from neighbouring states with security breaches in the FCT. He also directed beggars be sent back to their home states. In 2022, the FCTA reportedly repatriated 150 beggars back to their states. Even though the FCTA said some of the beggars would be camped in some centers to be properly documented, I doubt that they are not back on the streets happily plying their trade in cognito. Nigeria is hardly a country that keeps a viable record of either its citizens or its own activities. It beggars belief that some bureaucrat has a record of those evacuated to check the progress of their efforts at keeping them out of the FCT.
Before Bello was Senator Bala Mohammed, who also once ordered beggars―along with street hawkers and commercial sex workers— to leave the FCT urgently or face immediate arrest, detention, and prosecution. Preceding Bello was Adamu Aliero, who not only vowed to “clean” Abuja within six weeks but even went further to engage Peace Corp members to arrest beggars―and destitutes—and relocate them. Before Bello was Dr. Aliyu Modibbo Umar who also removed 395 beggars from Abuja and relocated them back to their respective states. Umar’s predecessor was Nasir El-Rufai who also did his own share of cleaning up the city and ridding it of street beggars.
The thing is, despite efforts by each leader, the beggars never stop streaming into the city. From different interviews with the beggars by journalists, one sees―and understands—why both the able-bodied and the disabled resort to begging. Those who speak range from people who have been poor victims of circumstances of terrorism and banditry, natural disasters, bad governance, and several historical injustices, to the disabled who has resolved to turn their physical condition into a spectacle that can commandeer alms from the guilt-tripped onlooker.

With the multi-dimensional poverty that the T-Pain economy has exacerbated, Wike will soon know that he has not even started to see the cringey sight of humans who must beg before they can eat. It remains to be seen how the will of the armed officials Wike directs to “take them out” can stand against that of a people whose instincts are geared towards survival. I envisage there would be a lot of brutality to get them off the streets, but there will not be enough power to keep them off. The best Abuja people will enjoy will be a moment’s respite.

If there is another way Wike will mirror his fictional counterpart, Mour Ndiaye, it will be through running against moral economy of almsgiving and Islamic culture. As one beggar astutely observed in The Beggars’ Strike, how would the rich and the powerful live if the poor did not beg? “Who would people give alms to, as they have to give alms to someone, religion tells us so?” The beggar’s question was well-reflected. By making themselves into a receptacle of the generosity of the rich—who must regularly offload their conscience somewhere— the beggar also performs a religious duty. Without the poor who have strategically positioned themselves to receive the charity of the rich as religion mandates, the rich would be imperiled. Ethical balance in the society is based and sustained through this interaction.

Wike will eventually realise that the political-religious culture of the city he superintends preponderantly relies on the economy of exchange between social groups divided by a wide class gulf, yet intricately intertwined through an ethical system of religious beliefs. The rich and powerful in Abuja exist because the beggars—frequently trotted out to vote for the vultures who will feast on their destinies for the next four years—exist. If Wike’s peers in Abuja have not succeeded in chasing away those beggars, it is because they realise that even these “dregs of the society” have voting thumbs they can always exploit. The beggars too understand the uneven calibration of power; they know they let them express their nuisance because they have something the rich wants. Wike had better be careful and not yell at them too much. If they go on strike against the APC in 2027, his behind will land painfully on the cold hard shores of Rivers state.