By Allieu Sahid Tunkara
Samuel Thomas Bojohn, the Assistant Director of Don Bosco Fambul, a charity organization specialized in child protection, said his organization has recorded nearly 50, 000 street children in Sierra Leone.
Out of this 2, 500 were in the Western Area, he said.
“The Ebola epidemic has added to the number of street children, and my organization has empirical evidence for that,” Bojohn said at a meeting last week at the Freetown City Council (FCC). He singled out the year 2013 for the highest recorded number of street kids. He said Don Bosco Fambul had embarked on the assessment of street children and came up with a policy for overall guidance.
“The urgent needs of street children are care, protection and psycho-social counseling,” he stated.
Bojohn blamed irresponsible parenting as one of the factors that lead children to the streets. While calling on parents to take the issue of street children seriously, he alluded to a situation in which a parent gave her child faeces to eat, a situation he described as a serious child abuse and an example of what force children to the streets.
Don Bosco is one of the leading authorities in child protection and has been operating in Sierra Leone since 1998. Bojohn said they were working on a bus service which would be a means of tracking down street children.
Olayinka Laggah, chairperson of the National Commission for Children (NCC), assured the occasion that her commission would work very hard to ensure that children live in a safe and secure environment. She appealed to the public to cooperate with all relevant institutions for the protection of children of all categories.
“For a child to grow well, there must be collective effort by everyone,” she said, before re-echoing Don Bosco Fambul`s assistant director`s concern on the increase in the number of street children.
Laggah said most of these children came to the street to sell, whilst others were brought to Freetown from the provinces with false promises.
Mrs Laggah referred to the Child Rights Act of 2007 as the main legal instrument for the protection of children and said that the law had been there for quite sometime.
“Now that the commission has been set up, it is necessary to fully implement the law so that we can protect our children,” she assured. Laggah said prior to the enforcement of the law, the public had to be well informed about it as no one would be spared and that “there would be no more business as usual.”
Speaking on Behalf of the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children’s Affairs (MSWGCA), Director for Children, Kadie Buya Kamara, deplored the sad state of children living on the streets. She said most of them had cause to leave their homes owing to lack of parental care.
“I don’t think that a man must be compelled by [the Ministry of] Social Welfare to take care of his children,” she said. Mrs Kamara also called on perpetrators of sexual offences to stop their criminal acts as the law would heavily fall on them.
“My key targets are those who perpetrate sexual offences, as well as those who traffic children from the provinces to Freetown,” she said.
A representative of the Family Support Unit (FSU), Ritta Cole, described the situation of children living on the streets as a clear example of child labour and exploitation. She said to even allow a child to engage in any work that affected their physical and emotional wellbeing amounted to child abuse. Cole informed the public that her institution had earlier put in place ‘Operation Dawn’ which focused mainly on street children. She said they were implementing the operation when the Ebola virus struck and halted everything.
Mayor of the Freetown municipality, Franklyn Bode Gibson, called on parents to restrain their children from going to the streets. Mayor Gibson described children as the human resource base of the country and said the future prosperity of the nation rest with them.
“We are now experiencing a high number of children in the street owing to careless and irresponsible parenting,” he said. He pointed out to the situation in which children gave birth to children as the principal factors of the huge number of street children. He said FCC would not relent and, in that direction, he appealed to the NCC and the FSU to get the children off the streets as they were exposed to many hazards.
The mayor said there was a high likelihood for these children to grow into bad individuals that would disrupt the peace of the state. He told his audience that although the responsibility of children squarely rests with the parents, they (children) belong to the state.
© Politico 29/04/15
