KCCA should enforce child protection law

Kampala’s messy roads leading into the city are swarmed with another irksome problem; street children and beggars. They have colonised traffic light points, junctions, and several streets.

They have grown in number as they have exasperatingly grown daring, brazen, and careless. The city already has numerous infrastructural and management problems and daring street children should not be an addition. 

They are a nuisance and inconvenience in traffic, especially in rush hours. Drivers have to slow down erratically as children play or run in the roads and sometimes as they run after vehicles.

On Jinja Road, at Nakawa, the sight of elderly women begging is a stain on the conscience of the country in how it deals with the most vulnerable. It also offers us a few ideas of how the Social Assistance Grants for Empowerment (SAGE) scheme isn’t very effective.

There have been numerous previous attempts by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), police, and the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development to weed the streets of street children but in no time they are always back.

We have also heard before that there is a cartel that reportedly trafficks these children from villages and forces them into the streets to beg. But it remains unclear whether authorities have ever interested themselves in investigating and bringing the cartels to book.

Section 16 of the Trafficking in Persons Act, 2009, provides that where a person is convicted of trafficking in persons, the court may in addition to any other punishment order that person to pay compensation to the victim for—physical injury; emotional distress; pain and suffering; loss or damage; and Any other damage that the court may deem fit.

In 2014, the US-based Human Rights Watch established that police and other officials beat, extorted money from, and arbitrarily detained street children during round-ups. These too, need to be punished.

Some  non-governmental organisations  and other civil society actors have in the past criticised the manner in which they said it was devoid of respect for basic rights, authorities have rounded up street children and beggars are rounded off the streets.

However, they are silent on practical solutions of dealing with the problem, while at the same time seem to agree that we need to have sanity along the streets.

On June 8, KCCA launched the child protection ordinance that prohibits acts that encourage children to hoover on the streets.

It is, therefore, high time that the authority went to work to enforce the ordinance because we urgently need sanity on the streets.