By Editorial Board
The Lagos State Task Force recently arrested 281 street urchins, a move framed as a victory for public order and as evidence that the state government was being decisive in cracking down on undesirable elements. The action screamed, “Government is working!” In truth, street urchins in Lagos can be stubborn and constitute huge nuisance. Some of them appear whenever vehicles break down, demanding for “our money”, sometimes without offering any assistance to the vehicle owner. At other times, they help push the vehicle away from busy highways, but invariably charge and insist on exorbitant fees. However, while the arrest may provide temporary relief for peace-loving residents, it point to a deeper malaise of a society unable to take care of its youth, particularly the less privileged. It marks a collapse of social responsibility. Rather than any reason to triumph, the issue invites reflection and signal that it is time for authorities to awaken and deliberately invest in justice, care and opportunity for a generation abandoned to the streets.
In a week-long operation, state officials swept through Fadeyi, Ikoyi, Victoria Island, Lekki, Ojuelegba, Yaba, Surulere and other thoroughfares. It appeared that nuisances had been removed, order restored, and therefore, society could live happily ever after. But behind the facade of a “clean-up” lies a disturbing reality. The young people described as Omotaku are not invading aliens from some faraway galaxy. They did not migrate from the northernmost fringes of the country either. They are the face of poverty, broken homes, joblessness and a social welfare system that largely consists of prominent leaders who appear briefly, distribute bags of rice and a few handouts, and then disappear. They are the creation of successive governments and their failures at citizen-centric leadership.
The phenomenon is more than a Lagos headache. Given its position as the economic nerve centre and most populous state, Lagos merely highlights and exposes Nigeria’s undeniable inequality. Across Ibadan, Benin, Onitsha, Aba, Port Harcourt, Abuja and other cities, thousands of young people drift between garages, markets and road junctions, surviving by begging, hawking, scavenging or petty extortion. While Lagos task force and patrol vans comb the nooks and crannies of the state, the national scale of the problem must be accorded due attention.
The current approach to the Omotaku episode suggests that authorities have yet to come to terms with how best to address the issue. Perceptions that social disorders must be crushed rather than corrected mean society will most likely continue to swirl in a vicious cycle. The Lagos State Task Force said that all 281 suspects have been arraigned and that their activities will soon be eradicated. Herein lies a familiar Nigerian dilemma. After court appearances, after fines are handed down or sentences passed, what comes next? In the absence of state-funded rehabilitation that includes shelter and skills training, the urchins will most likely return to the streets.
Tension between security agencies and social justice is not peculiar to Lagos. Across the country, states have embraced task-force-style responses to social disorder, deploying uniformed personnel while neglecting the deeper option of strengthening social support systems. When Kano’s Hisbah is not hunting down persistent sex workers and beer lovers in the North-West, Lagos State’s KAI in the South-West is waging a seemingly never-ending war with street traders. It is easier to be seen cracking down on urchins or tearing down the sheds of hawkers than painstakingly building a responsive social system. Or, as the late Afrobeats maestro Fela Anikulapo-Kuti put it, “Na the burn burn, na im dey sweet dem pass.”
Omotaku is a heartbreaking reflection of Nigeria’s informal economy of survival. It shows how the absence of employment pushes people from desperate hustling to the borders of crime. It also reveals how insecurity grows not from innate wickedness but from decades of structural neglect. Vehicles develop mechanical faults or are snarled in traffic, and rather than approach to sell a chilled drink or offer a service, young men swoop on motorists and flee with their belongings. When a nation’s teeming youth population lacks jobs, hunger can turn roads into workplaces and a broken-down car into an opportunity to earn a despicable stipend.
That these activities persist in places synonymous with wealth and power, such as Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Lekki, is especially revealing. Lagos prides itself as Nigeria’s “Centre of Excellence”. If such visible, poverty-bred disorder is found in its most prized districts, it speaks volumes about urban inequality and the strain on governance. For Nigerians elsewhere, the lesson is clear: if Lagos, with its resources and revenues, struggles to manage these pressures, other cities face even steeper odds unless there is a fundamental change in approach.
Admonishing youths that crime is not a career is a good idea. But hunger is not, and neither is the failure to provide credible alternatives in the form of jobs, education or support. What this incident ultimately exposes is a national crisis of youth neglect. Nigeria treats its young people with indifference. Schools decay, social services are fragmented, and families under economic pressure fracture, pushing children onto the streets. When the inevitable consequences manifest as Omotaku, the government’s response is muscular but shallow, addressing symptoms while ignoring causes.
A more desirable response would begin by admitting that enforcement alone cannot solve what enforcement did not create. There must be conscious investment in preventive measures. Security is not merely the absence of nuisance on the road, but the presence of dignity in people’s lives. Authorities should also recognise that youth migration and street survival are national patterns requiring national solutions.
Civil society, religious institutions and the private sector have roles to play, but leadership must come from the state, because only the state can align policy, funding and enforcement into a coherent whole. To continue as before is to normalise a cruel cycle: neglect breeds desperation, desperation breeds disorder, disorder invites repression, and repression deepens neglect.
The arrest of 281 street urchins is a part solution to what happens when a society fails its young and then punishes them for surviving. Nigeria can continue to chase its children from road to road, or it can choose the harder, nobler path of building a country in which the road is no longer their home. The difference between those choices is the difference between a state that merely controls space and one that is truly responsive to its people.
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