By YESTERDAY, I was having a discussion with an elderly man and then a young boy walked in. We were in a church, so this young boy just walked in and approached me; I had not met him before.
The boy told me he was hungry and asked me to give him money to eat; it was around noon. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but I just picked up my purse and told him I would give him a hundred naira to buy a cup of garri. I gave him the money and the elderly man with me asked if I believed him; I said I didn’t know.
IImage for illustration. Source: CHATGPT
Then, the man called the young boy and started to interrogate him. He asked for his name, where he lived, where his parents were, and so on.
From our interrogation, we discovered the boy lives in an estate and he attends a popular private school at Eleyele, Ibadan. Then, the man asked this boy if he had not eaten anything that day and he said he only ate breakfast. I was shocked. So, you ate breakfast this morning and, at noon (12:00p.m), you are already begging around for money to eat? Then we asked him what he ate and he told us he ate rice for breakfast. Wow!
He said his parents had gone to work. He is just 10 years old and he is Primary Four. We counseled him and he left. Mind you, the boy speaks English fluently.
Later in the day while I was sharing the story with my sisters, two of my sisters that just walked in asked me to describe the boy and I did. Then, they told me they met the young boy before they came in and he begged them for some money; that was around 6:00 pm. I became weak.
How do we handle the case of this boy and many others? How do we curtail this? How do we stop these children from graduating to stealing and other societal vices?
