Minister admits govt too poor to deal with street kids menace

By Auther Chimbgwa

Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare minister Edgar Moyo has admitted that the removal of homeless children – commonly known as street kids – from city pavements and alleyways will always be a tough task as the government does not have attractive resources to keep them away from the streets where they often receive petty handouts from the public.

Fielding questions from MPs recently, Moyo said the age-old problem is worsened by the continued departure of social services staff for greener pastures abroad.

“If you take them (street kids) to an institution where there are a bit of inadequacies and they cannot get extra cash for their other needs, the temptation to go back to the street is very high,” the minister said.

Moyo said his ministry was still trying to “source the resources to capacitate the ministry to adequately look after these people”.

“The other problem that we have is the issue of our social workers. This is one area where we are getting a lot of brain drain as a country, maybe because we are not paying attractively as compared to Europe.

“You know the ageing populations in some parts of Europe is creating this brain drain away from us. We have very good institutions that are training our professionals in social work.

“They are attracted and they are being drawn from us and given better packages.”

The minister said the “small” retention allowance that is given to social development officers “is not strong enough of a motivation for them to stay on”.

Social workers have a duty identifying street kids who need to be removed from the streets.

Coupled with remedies to remove homeless children from the streets, minister Moyo said the country’s social development division was also trying to locate relatives of street children to reintegrate them with their families.

“In some cases, you find that the whole family is also on the streets. So, the rehabilitation process that I was talking about, we want to institutionalise them.

“Some of them are homeless, others are just because they enjoy begging. They find it easy to get money from passers-by.

“We are trying to locate, reintegrate and then rehabilitate these people but we need a lot of resources to do that,” said minister Moyo.

Nyanga constituency MP Supa Mandiwanzira warned that because of their exposure to crime on the street, street kids could grow up to become hardcore criminals.

“It does seem like a nuisance right now but when you project into the future, in 10 years, the level of criminal activity is likely to be very high, as well as a broken generation,” Mandiwanzira said.

The minister said street kids have in the past been taken to a home which had perimeter wall but a lot of them abandoned the place and ran back to the streets.

“To achieve all that, we need Treasury funding because social protection is the responsibility of the government to look after its people, particularly the disadvantaged ones,” Moyo said, adding there were also adults who were loitering in the streets who must also be removed, but enforcement of removal is administered by the Home Affairs Ministry.

“So, we liaise with Home Affairs to remove such people but then the problem is that they also relapse and go back to the streets.

“So, it should be an ongoing thing but then the sustainable way is identification, capacitating them, rehabilitating them … we remove them and after two or three days, they come back to the streets.”

Minister Moyo said that where they were doing a perimeter wall was something just to keep them in, but “did not want that institution to be a prison”.