Students during the day, young hawkers and beggars at night: The unforgiving life in Nairobi
These young ones brave the chilly Nairobi nights to hawk their wares to passers-by who, in most cases, snob them.
By Samuel O. Abuya
It is 7pm and I’m walking down Mama Ngina Street, one of the busiest and most famous streets of Kenyan capital, Nairobi. I’ve been working late today. The only thing ringing in my mind as I maneuver through the heavy human traffic in this street is getting home and taking a hot shower, then a rest. Not even having my dinner.
But one thing grabs my attention even with my focus of getting home as quickly as possible. It is something peculiar but one which is almost becoming a definition of Nairobi at night, scenes of children, some as young as 7, in the streets at night.
I see one from afar approaching a passer-by trying to persuade him over something. I’m not really sure what it is. The passer-by snobs the young one. This makes me want to know exactly what the kid, as well as her companions, are doing out in the streets at a time like this, 7pm – forgetting to go for a moment.
The girl I approach is an 11-year-old Salma (not her real name for obvious reasons), a grade six student in one of the primary schools in the outskirts of Nairobi. She warmly welcomes me.
“Uncle karibu, njugu ni ten bob tu. (welcome uncle, it is only ten shillings, an equal of $0.1, for groundnuts),” Salma quickly tells me in the Swahili slang.
It is then that I know that these little children are braving the chilly night to hawk wares and some busy begging from passers-by, something which really moves me. It is a habit that has been going on for quite a while in almost all major streets of Nairobi at night.
I manage to convince Salma to forgo her hawking for a moment and talk to me.
She is among what can be termed as hundreds of young kids who throng streets as dark sets in to either beg or hawk wares. But who sends them or where do they get these wares they are hawking? That is my first question to Salma. She hesitates for a moment. Something expected given that am a total stranger to her. But she finally opens up and what she tells me moves me and will, beyond any reasonable doubt, touch any right thinking grown up.
Salma tells me that unlike other children who rush home to begin their homework after school, she heads home to quickly change and pick the rolls of groundnuts, about 300 rolls, which her mother has prepared for her to hawk around the city. On a good day, she tells me, she can make up to Kshs 3000, an equivalent of $31. But if she has to meet that target, she says, she has to stay out in the streets until 9pm. By the time we are talking, Salma has only 10 rolls of groundnuts translating to about $1.
Not lucky either
It is a bit difficult talking to this young girl as she keeps on dashing from one point to the other persuading people to buy her groundnuts. But I’ve to keep calm and wait to talk to her. She gets a moment and comes back to me again.
As we continue chatting, another young girl approaches us with an over-sized bowl. She looks around 8-years-old and I’m eager to know what she’s carrying. I realize it is an empty bowl and she is Salma’s younger sister, Mbithe.
Mbithe has been begging as her elder sister continues to sell groundnuts.
I ask them how they get to and from the city. They tell me that is the least of their worries as it is simple. They rely on public service vehicles that charge them very little or at times the drivers or their conductors take a roll of groundnuts instead of them paying, something which Salma says is a fair deal.
Salma tells me her parents are casual labourers in the outskirts of Nairobi and as such, hawking in the city is the only sure way of bringing an extra coin in the family.
“Our mother has a young baby and she cannot do much hard work right now. She only fries and packages the groundnuts,” Salma said.
Arrest parents
The plight of these young ones has caught the eyes of local authorities who are now calling on the Nairobi County government to address it with immediate effect.
The children I managed to speak to affirmed that they don’t get time to settle down and do their homework or even have a shower as poverty, broken or dysfunctional homes force them to do some work that exposes them to exploitations.
According to statistics released by the European Union not long ago, there are at least 1.9 million children locked in child labour in Kenya with the agriculture sector being identified as the leading employer of minors closely followed by the domestic sector. Most of the employed minors are said to be between 5 and 17 years old.
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