North Nigeria packs up child beggars over virus fears

KANO, Nigeria: Hundreds of boys have their names and temperatures checked as they wait to board buses in a northern Nigeria´s city to transport them back to their villages. The children are pupils of controversial Islamic schools who would usually be found begging in the streets of Kano for small change. Now, they are the first batch in a programme that seeks to curb the spread of coronavirus by clearing some 250,000 children from the city´s streets and squalid seminaries.

“For now we have a total of 1,595 children which we are going to evacuate,” Muhammad Sanusi Kiru, Kano´s education commissioner, told AFP as the first buses readied to leave Tuesday. “This is a gradual process, we are doing it in phases, we are picking them step-by-step.”

Usually a vibrant city of four million people, Kano is the third hardest-hit area by the virus in Nigeria, with 73 confirmed cases and one death. Residents are under a week-long lockdown that has seen roads emptied and people largely remaining indoors. As part of the clampdown, the authorities have also turned their attention to child beggars who, according to one estimate, could number several million in this state.

For generations, parents in majority-Muslim north Nigeria have sent their sons from as young as six to learn the Koran with local clerics at unlicensed schools known as Almajiris. The lessons are free, but the children must fend for themselves, usually by begging or performing menial jobs.

The seminaries — which often double as so-called “rehabilitation centres” for drug addicts — came into the spotlight last year after raids across northern Nigeria uncovered men and boys held in atrocious conditions. Some residents were found chained up, while hundreds were crammed together in filthy rooms. In an open letter to northern leaders last month, the civil society Almajiri Child Right Initiative called for the children to be taken home and feeding programmes to be laid on for those left behind.