Nigeria's crackdown on begging possibly violating human rights

With Nigeria’s parliament poised to extend a controversial law banning the “menace of street begging” throughout the country, campaigners are warning the policy has already resulted in the persecution of tens of thousands of disabled and mentally ill citizens.

Street begging is illegal in Lagos, Nigeria’s most populous city, and carries fines of around N15,000 (£38) and up to three months’ imprisonment. Those who fail to pay the fine are incarcerated until they are able to pay up.

But due to poor medical support, the people begging on Lagos’s street are disproportionately made up of mentally ill and disabled citizens, and human rights activists say tens of thousands of vulnerable people have been detained over the past five years as a result of the ban.

Megan Chapman, a human rights lawyer and director of the local NGO Justice and Empowerment Initiatives (JEI), said the “scale of human rights violations is massive and extremely concerning”, and added the treatment may be illegal under the country’s constitution.

Though campaigners from JEI acknowledged that begging is also banned in other cities across the world, they claim the ban is policed brutally and without transparency in Lagos. “It’s hard to find a city enforcing the ban in as inhumane a way as Lagos is,” Chapman said.

Despite widespread calls from NGOs and activists for the state to reconsider its policy, the Nigerian senate is now considering a bill to ban begging nationwide.

The bill, proposed by Senator Isah Misau, has substantial backing in the senate, with lawmakers claiming the increase in begging is caused by criminal exploitation rather than poor economic conditions in Nigeria, which is now officially in recession.

Speaking in support of the proposed legislation, Misau said: “Street begging affects not only the geographical and social structure of urban areas; it also portrays the country in a bad light to tourists and foreign visitors.”

Lagos state’s governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has backed the crackdown on street begging. “We’ve had security reports on the activities of persons who pose as beggars, especially in traffic, but their sole aim is to perpetrate evil,” he said in July.

The state government said in April that 1,340 beggars, destitute and “mentally challenged persons” had been “rescued” from the streets of Lagos in the past year. During this period, it said 590 “rehabilitees” had been released and reunited with their relatives for re-integration, while 1,228 people were rehabilitated at what it referred to as a “rehabilitation and training centre” in Majidun, on mainland Lagos.

In addition, according to a leaked memo cited on the Nigerian site PM News, 413 beggars and “lunatics” were reportedly evacuated from Lagos’s streets by government officials between March and July this year.

Most of those detained for begging are taken to the holding facility by the so-called “rescue team” from the Lagos State Youth and Development Ministry, which enforces the ban.

The centre was opened as part of a drive to clean up the city in the 1970s. State officials claim it is used to help and treat beggars and people who are physically or mentally ill, yet reports from former detainees paint a different picture.

Men and women held there have described torturous conditions, claiming to have been denied basic rights and medical attention, held in confined spaces, often for years, without a fair hearing.

“We have met dozens of people arrested for begging who have been made to pay a hefty bribe, who have been deprived of their liberty for months or even years. Not one of them has ever been taken before a court of law. It is a serious violation of their rights under the Nigerian constitution,” she said.

“What we’ve been pressing the state government to do is to have a root and branch overhaul of the system; stop the mass incarcerations that impact on the health and well-being of the beggars.”

Workers from JEI, along with the Physically Challenged Empowerment Initiative (PCEI), a grassroots organisation campaigning against the detentions, have looked after several people after their release from the centre.

Among them was 25-year-old Yakubu Idris. After his arrest and 20-month detention at the Majidun facility, his health deteriorated. Interviewed hours after his release, he said: “Now I cannot walk – I cannot even stand up from the floor.”

Despite suffering from extensive infections and a respiratory problem, Idris said he was denied medical treatment by officials at the facility. “In the cell I totally forgot how long I was there because I was never let out. Then one day theoga [boss] took two of us and released us,” he said.

A week later, tests for tuberculosis came back positive, but Idris died before he could receive treatment.

Chapman said calls for change by local NGOs were slowly being heeded, but the proposed bill threatened to undermine years of work to change attitudes towards beggars.

“We have pointed out that current practices are completely unconstitutional and fail to address the social problems of destitution and street begging. The focus should be on helping the poor and people living with disabilities to find alternative livelihoods,” she said.

Under the previous Lagos state governor, scores of beggars were routinely deported to their states of origin. In 2011, 3,029 people were deported from Lagos. Dolapo Badru, a state government spokesman at the time, defended the measures, arguing that “beggars and destitutes constitute a social nuisance towards the development of Lagos as a mega-city”.

Muhammed Zanna, one of the founders of the PCEI in Lagos said negative perceptions of the poor had led to widespread apathy about the way they are treated by the state.

“Governor Ambode wants to create a modern city and the poor don’t fit into that vision,” said Zanna.

“The state doesn’t see beggars as real people, just as people to hide or to send away. People who have no interaction with the poor or disabled have this idea that they are really criminals and drug dealers, so even when the state services maltreats them people don’t show any concern,” Zanna said.

State officials at the youth ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

Officials at the facility in Majidun denied detainees were kept in harsh conditions indefinitely or denied basic rights, and claimed a doctor was available to provide treatment. They also say it is merely “a temporary holding site” until fines are paid or a hearing takes place.

Forty-year-old Binta Muhammadu was arrested in February with her two children, aged two and four. When she couldn’t pay the fine, she was detained at Majidun for nine months, with her children held elsewhere. “In that time I only saw my children three times,” she said.

According to Binta, “there were about 50 of us in the same room, where we bathed, ate and slept. We were never let out,” she said.

“I don’t know what I will do now that I am free,” she added. “I don’t have anything and I can’t walk well any more. This has just made things worse for me than it was before.”

Guardian

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Nigeria military denies killing 150 Pro-Biafra demonstrators

Nigerian authorities have denied claims by Amnesty International that security forces killed at least 150 activists and demonstrators who supported the secession of Biafra, an area in the south-east of the country.

An army spokesman told Reuters that Amnesty’s allegation, the latest in a series of charges levelled by the campaign group against Nigeria’s military in the last year, aimed to tarnish the security forces’ reputation.

The police said they did not attack people holding demonstrations.

Amnesty said the military fired live ammunition with little or no warning to disperse members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group between August 2015 and August the following year.

The unrest in the region is another challenge for the country’s president,Muhammadu Buhari, who is grappling with a sharp slowdown in Africa’s biggest economy, as well as the bloody Boko Haram insurgency in the north-east, and militancy elsewhere in the oil-rich southern Delta region.

Amnesty’s 60-page report based on interviews with 193 people, 87 videos and 122 photographs, said troops and the police used “arbitrary, abusive and excessive force to disrupt gatherings”.

Local media had previously reported “massive extra judicial killings” of pro-Biafra activists in Nigeria’s south-east.


Amnesty corroborated many of these claims, saying that at least 60 people were killed and 70 injured in two days in May after campaigners gathered for a rally in Onitsha , Anambra state.

Secessionist feeling has simmered since the separatist rebellion by the eastern Igbo people, one of Nigeria’s largest ethnic groups, led to a three-year civil war that ended 46 years ago. An estimated million people died, mostly from starvation and illness, in the conflict, which left deep scars and deep resentment.

Analysts say many of the same factors which prompted earlier anger still exist, and describe “a cocktail of longstanding and recent economic and political grievances”.

Now, like then, Igbos say they have been marginalised by being excluded from key government posts and denied vital funding for infrastructure development, schools and hospitals.


Anger in Biafra flared last year after the IPOB leader, Nnamdi Kanu, who was based in the UK, was detained on a visit to Nigeria and charged with criminal conspiracy and with belonging to an illegal society.

The arrest of Kanu, who set up an underground radio station in London, which authorities say called for violent attacks on Nigerian security forces, prompted supporters to hold protests. These were dispersed with live ammunition, according to Amnesty.

Don Awunah, a Nigeria police force spokesman, said that officers “always abide by the law” and adhere to best practices. “We don’t attack people who are demonstrating, which every Nigerian has a right to do,” he said.

Sani Usman, an army spokesman, said Biafra separatists had behaved violently, killing five policeman at a protest in May and attacking both military and police vehicles. “The military and other security agencies exercised maximum restraints despite the flurry of provocative and unjustifiable violence,” said Usman.

Witnesses told Amnesty that some protesters had thrown stones, burned tyres and, in one incident, shot at the police, but added that “these acts of violence did not justify the level of force used against the whole assembly”.

Makmid Kamara, interim director of Amnesty International Nigeria, said: “This reckless and trigger-happy approach to crowd control has caused at least 150 deaths.”

The campaign group said their research showed a disturbing pattern of hundreds of arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment by soldiers during and after IPOB events, including arrests of wounded victims in hospital, and torture and other ill treatment of detainees.

One interviewee said he was shot during a protest meeting and hid in a gutter. When soldiers found him they poured acid on him, he said.

Last year Amnesty said that more than 8,000 people had died in detention during a crackdown on Boko Haram. The group also said soldiers killed hundreds of Shia Muslims in the northern city of Zaria in December 2015. A judicial inquiry in August concluded that 347 people were killed and buried in mass graves after those clashes.

Nigeria has at least 170 million inhabitants, split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims across about 250 ethnic groups, who mostly co-exist peacefully.

Buhari, a former military dictator in the 1980s, was a brigade major who commanded troops in Biafra during the war in which soldiers were accused of mass atrocities. Last year Buhari said he would not let any secessionist campaign in Biafra succeed. “We will not let that happen. For Nigeria to divide now, it is better for all of us to jump into the sea and get drowned,” he said.

One grievance among some who support Biafran independence is that Nigeria’s presidents have tended to come from the north or south-west – areas dominated by Hausa and Yoruba people – which, they say, has led to Igbos not being appointed to influential government positions.

In 2012 a surge in protests led to the arrest on treason charges of more than a 100 supporters of a secessionist group after an independence rally in Enugu, the capital of Nigeria’s south-east region. The protesters included many elderly war veterans from the bloody 1967 conflict.

The arrests came shortly after the renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe wrote in the Guardian that persecution of Igbos still persisted in Nigeria. Achebe’s memoirs prompted renewed debate about the 1960s conflict. Most of those involved in the current campaign for independence for Biafra are too young to remember the earlier war.

Analysts do not believe those campaigning for Biafra will make common cause with other militants in the Niger delta.

“Most groups in the delta are demanding regional autonomy and the right to control their petroleum resources within Nigeria. They are fiercely opposed to any suggestion of joining the Igbos in a breakaway Biafra,” wrote the International Crisis Group last year.

Guardian