A visitor to Kenya reported in an English paper as observing: “A young mother, no older than 16, sat in the dirt, wheezily breathing from a jar of glue. Her eyes glazed over as the solvent fumes stupefied her senses. Then she casually passed the toxic jar for her one-year-old child to sniff. Close by, children of five and six buried their mouths and noses in similar jars, hungrily inhaling the hazardous chemicals. These are the glue kids of Kenya....”. Sights like this confront all visitors to informal settlements or even on streets of towns. The street children, as they are called, number nearly half a million in Kenya alone — more than 100 million globally.
Last Sunday 12 April my wife and I were invited to a gathering of street children in Nairobi. April 12 is now the Street Children’s day marked throughout the world. In Kenya, however, the Street Children’s Day, intended to draw attention to the plight of street children and to lobby for improvement in their circumstances, passed off without any acknowledgement by the government, the media or civil society (except for a handful of dedicated groups who brought together a number of street children who we met, for a decent meal, provision of medical assistance, and companionship). And yet, as an experienced journalist commented, we care more for refugees than for these, our own, children (one might add, and we don’t seem to care for refugees much).
Kenya’s constitution fully acknowledges the rights of children and places obligations on the state and citizens to uphold these rights. Children are entitled to all the rights that other citizens are entitled to, including human dignity, personal security, basic human needs (including health services, adequate housing, reasonable standards of sanitation, education, clean and safe water, and freedom from hunger). Like others, they are entitled to the rights and comfort of family life. They also have special rights – to be protected from abuse, neglect, harmful cultural practices, all forms of violence and inhuman treatment, parental care and protection, and in all aspects concerning them, “a child’s best interests are of paramount importance”. So much for Utopia – what is the reality? Simply that the street children enjoy none of these rights.
The few studies of street children present a grim picture. Many street children are without a home, sleeping on pavements and even in worse conditions. In the minds of many people, they are associated with glue sniffing, yet sniffing is the symptom (more like a pain killer) rather than the cause of their malady. The typical profile of a street child is as follows. She – girls constitute a minority but significant number of street children – is likely to be any age from five to 15 years, probably from a rural family who were driven by poverty to find employment in towns. Perhaps her father had died without making provision for the family, or just as likely, tensions in the family, in a strange environment without the support of the rural community, had driven her away from the family, maybe encouraged by a street child friend to leave her family. She had known poverty all her life, and leaving home seems like an escape from tensions within the household; and maybe — this is not unusual – she was actually abandoned by her parents. Life outside is no better — generally worse; she is vulnerable to sexual assaults (and may end up by offering sexual service for tawdry sums — (even as early as 10 years) and many forms of exclusion.
There is a constant sense of physical insecurity and vulnerability, especially from the police — an observer comments that child justice system is the most incapacitated in the judicial hierarchy. Here, as elsewhere, the police enjoy total impunity. Our street child is uncertain of where the next meal would come from — perhaps salvaging something edible through the community waste heap. And then sleeping on the heap — I was told that this keeps her warmer than the pavement. Chances that she might go to school are somewhat slim — though more street children go to school that we might imagine. Living with abject poverty defines her existence. Society has rejected her and her friends.
But she is not alone. Rejected by family or community, she finds comfort in the company of other street children, a sense of camaraderie. Perhaps she has a boyfriend who protects her from those who would force her into sex with them (sex appears prominently in studies of street children). And there are a few organisations which work with the street children, to help them to cope with the world, find places for them in schools, provide medical treatment, and arrange accommodation. But their acts are more like palliatives than the radical surgery necessary to ameliorate their abject poverty, lack of security and lack of opportunities, and marginalisation of their families and the communities they belong to.
For the truth is that their malaise is symptomatic of the wider malaise in Kenyan state and society. There can be no justice in a system where wealth is so unequally distributed as here, where the children of the rich go to posh schools, driven by chauffeurs in posh limousines while others have no access to the most rudimentary education — even when they are willing to walk for over an hour to the school. That some people live in grand villas in “leafy” suburbs, while others are encamped, several of them together, in a 8 by 8 room, deprived of most basic amenities, like access to toilet facilities — and where going to a distant toilet is to court sexual assault, if not worse. That some people go to fancy bars for a tot of scotch costing Sh10,000 while others cannot afford clean water — and Sh10,000 would see them through a few months. That some people can go to London for a minor ailment, while others have no access to any medical care, however serious the illness. Their only chance maybe at the sort of event we went to last week where several medical organisations offered consultations.
We have become a deeply divided society, between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor; the rich pampered by the state driven economy, and the marginalised driven to a form of slavery to enable the rich to become richer. There is no doubt that the state has created these differences and hierarchies — through various forms of favouritism, corrupt deals, impunities, eliminating the relative equality of the old system. Every year the number of Kenyans among the wealthiest of the world increases while more and more Kenyans fall into the poverty trap. The entrapment of the street children is not of their choosing, just as moving out of it is beyond them.
Their plight is symbolic of a wider marginalisation, as it is of the reproduction of the political class that has stolen the resources of the state. The ruling class tries to hide this phenomenon through the feigned politics of ethnicity, assisted by the media, which is given to celebrating the ill gotten gains of the new class, while ignoring completely the misery of the masses of people, the victims of the new class. Let us hope that next year the media will give some attention to the Street Children’s Day — though it is too much to expect it to give even a small proportion to these children of the space that they routinely give to the celebrations of Valentine’s day among the rich.