Additional 40 beggars evacuated from streets in Ilorin
* Foreign currency, sharp knife recovered from 2 in the exercise
Stephen Olufemi Oni , Ilorin
Officials of the Kwara State Ministry of Social Welfare and Development, in collaboration with operatives of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCS), have reinvigorated the evacuation exercise of beggars from the streets of Ilorin during which 40 of them were picked up.
During the profiling and search conducted on the beggars, a foreign currency (US dollar), was found on one of them, Musa Mahmuda, who claimed to be from Kano state with other cash of N18,000.
Another beggar was found in possession of a sharp knife.
Among the 40 evacuated beggars, seven of them comprising four women and three males, were second term offenders, having been arrested previously during one of the evacuation exercises, but later returned to the streets again.
The latest evacuation exercise also involved the Special Assistant to the Governor on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control, Mikail Aileru, and it took the team to areas such as the Tipper Garage, Tanke, Offa garage and Geri Alimi round about, among others, where majority of them were evacuated.
Speaking with journalists on the sidelines of the programme, the
State Commissioner for Social Welfare and Development, Dr. Mariam Imam, expressed delight that the excercise was yielding the desired results, noting that the number of those evacuated from the streets has “drastically reduced from 94 arrested during the last exercise to less than 40 now”.
She added: “The ministry’s evacuation team was changing its strategy even as the beggars too were changing their tactics and locations to evade being arrested and evacuated from the streets.”
She implored those patronising the beggars to stop doing so and channel their offerings through religious organisations, orphanages and places of worship, reiterating that street begging has been outlawed in Kwara State.
Also speaking, the Head, Non- Custodian Centre of the Nigerian Correctional Services, Kwara Command, Adebayo Okunola, an Assistant Controller of Prisons (ACP), said appropriate punitive measures would be meted out to the arrested beggars to serve as deterrents to them and others.
“We will make sure that they clean the streets, they will sweep the streets so that they will know that there is dignity in labour”, he added.
Minkail, on his part, said the excercise was meant to sanitise the city of Ilorin and ward off criminal elements from the streets, adding that some of them might be disguising as street beggars to aid and abet crimes.