The Menace of Thuggery in Our Society ~ APEP Publications!

The Menace of Thuggery in Our Society

Thuggery is a menace which is seriously ravaging our society and wasting a great chunk of generations of our youths who should have been meaningful to the development of our nation. Speculations have shown that there is a direct linkage between thuggery and the growing level of poverty in our country fueled by unemployment and joblessness. All these thugs are jobless youths who do not have any gainful means of living. They therefore resort to thuggery.

Our research also shows that in most cases, thuggery becomes a fall out from both child-hawking and failed apprenticeship. Majority of the thugs we have in Onitsha today are either boys who grew up hawking at motor parks and along the streets or those who were expelled from their masters’ houses either during or at the completion of their service years as trade apprentices. These boys turn to other means of survival, first as conductors to commercial bus drivers and then to fulltime thuggery. At the end of the day, they become miscreants and eventually turn to criminals and agents of conflict and disorder in the society. Most of the intergroup, inter-religious and inter communal conflicts we experience these days are directly or indirectly perpetuated and influenced by these youths who are thugs.

Inasmuch as their actions and ways of lives are unjustifiable by any means, they were influenced by circumstances, which were, most times, beyond their control. Therefore, any meaningful move towards combating the menace of thuggery must as a matter of necessity, address these fundamental circumstances giving rise to this social vice.

Hence, in fighting the menace of thuggery in our society, there are three fundamental social realities/practices we are going to confront. They are:

Unemployment/Joblessness
Child-Hawking
Mode of apprenticeship and domestic servitude

These social realities/practices have direct link to thuggery, poverty and conflicts in our society.

1) Unemployment

I actually think the onus lies on government to create job, both directly and indirectly. But when you consider the fact that there is a gulf of difference between being unemployed and being unemployable. When someone does not have any training, skill or qualification, the person is simply unemployable because such person cannot add any value to the labour market. This is actually where our actions are required. Most of these people who are thugs are no longer employable except, for the wrong purpose. Due to their wrong orientation, in some cases, and lack of either skill of qualification, they cannot be helped, neither can they help themselves.

Hence we designed some programmes on re-orientation of these categories of youths and further capacity building workshop, which are aimed at equipping them with skills and knowledge to either help themselves (through self-employment) or be helped.

2) Child-Hawking

Hawking is a common practice in our society. Going through our streets, especially major roads and highways, there are common sights that are evident; hawking and thuggery. One may not witness the actions of thugs especially if the person has no cause to drop at any motor park or bus stop. However, hawkers are obvious and worst of all, mostly women and children. These are people from poor homes who can barely afford their daily bread, hence they resort to hawking on the streets, roads, motor parks and major high ways. If the parents hawk themselves, it would have been better than letting their children hawk on the streets, parks and market. Hawking at such tender age, expose these children to several social vices like smoking, lawlessness and most of them end up in thuggery/prostitution. This is because while plying their trade, they mingle with thugs, miscreants and all manner of people. As a result, they start building their concept of the society, albeit wrong, and device so many strategies to adapt. Seeing their behavioral pattern would surely convince you that they would end up being thugs, prostitutes or criminals.

Anambra State Government established a law that forbids every form of hawking by children of school age, most especially during school hours. To implement this, children of school age caught hawking during school hours are arrested and detained until their parents come and bail them with specific amount of money which serve as penalty for letting their children hawk during school hours. In as much as this law helps to checkmate the problem, it is not total in tackling this menace. There are still some flaws. For instance; what happens to the children when they hawk outside school hours? Arresting and detaining the children at such age does not give them positive view of the society and might even expose them to more danger and increase the possibility of corruption as they might mingle with miscreant in police cells where they are kept after arrest. This would certainly affect their lives, development and orientation negatively.

However, since the Government has shown the will to tackle this, it is our collective responsibility to support the government by contributing our quota. We can do this by going a step further, assessing the situation first hand, intervening in these circumstances and by further recommending viable course of actions to the government.

3) Apprenticeship

Apprenticeship is a major social practice in this part of the world. It is explained as a system whereby a person (usually called an apprentice) learns a craft or trade from an instructor (usually called a master or mistress) for a set period of time and under set conditions. There are predominantly two modes under which this practice is being carried out. This two modes of apprenticeship also distinguishes the classes of people in our society; the rich and the poor.

The first mode of apprenticeship is largely more organized. A person identifies a trade or craft he/she want to learn and meets with a known trader or craftsperson who specializes in that and draws up an agreement with the master/mistress to learn the trade under him/her for a specified period of time. In this mode, the apprentice pays a specified amount for learning the trade or craft. After the agreed period, the apprentice is freed to go and start his/her own trade/craft. In this mode also, the graduating apprentice would be responsible for his/her start-up capital. This means that either the apprentice, the parents or the sponsor, as the case may be, must have strong financial requirement to take care of both the payment for the apprenticeship and for the start-up as well. In most cases as these, there are little or no conflicts as each party tries to keep its own part of the agreements. Like I say, these mode of apprenticeship is practiced mostly by rich men whose children or wards have no intention of continuing formal education.

The second mode is a bit different from the first; it is more of a servitude. In this mode, most times traders and craftsperson identifies a young boy or girl and approaches the parents to allow the boy/girl to serve them for a period of years, after which the child would be settled to start his/her own trade/craft. In most cases, girls are taken as housemaids while the boys are taken to serve their masters or madam at the shops and places of trades/crafts and learn at the process. The agreement, which is usually oral, is that the apprentice would serve the master for six (6) years, in most cases, and five (5) cases in some cases, after which he/she would be settled by the master with some amount of money (unspecified/undetermined) to start-up his/her own business. There are no criteria to determine the amount to be given the apprentice as settlement and this is where the problem lies. Or better put, this is the basis of all other problems found in this mode of apprentice because nearly everything is wrong in this mode of apprenticeship.

i. There was no formal agreement whatsoever between the two parties and since, as the saying goes, “who pays the piper calls the tune”, a lot of things do go wrong. In all, the apprentice is solely at the mercy of the master.

ii. The mode of service is not fully defined so anything goes. Most of these boys serve both as house maids doing house chores for the madam of the house as well as serve as sales persons in their masters’ shops.

iii. A lot of things go wrong within the years of service, which could be interpreted as injustice. Some of these children are seriously maltreated in different ways; some are starved, some got even killed, while many are expelled without just cause. There are some masters that have developed the habit of expelling their servants just few months before their settlement. They end up cooking up one lie upon another just to find an excuse to expel these servants because they are so selfish and greedy that they would not want to spend their money in settling the boys. There are a lot of instances.

I call this “failed apprenticeship”. There are other cases of marginalisation from different angles. There was this case of a boy in Onitsha main market, who won about 10 million naira from NairaBet, which he played with just N100.00 assumed to be his feeding money. Upon hearing the news, the master seized the money on the claims that the boy used his (the master’s) money in playing the bet, hence every proceed belongs to the master. When it became a problem, several stakeholders were involved and they came up with different views. They might be all right in their respective views since the mode of the apprenticeship was not determined ab initio.

This is one of the major ills in our society today. The level of injustice being witnessed in this practice is quite alarming. As we all know, the impact from these injustices is not just the fear of divine repercussions, but more apparently and substantiated in reality is the socio-economic effects of these forms of injustice in our society especially in the South East. The face of these social injustices is epitomized in the maltreatment, abuses and cheating experienced by domestic workers and trade apprentices at the hands of their bosses. The root of these ill-treatments comes from the fact that there is no terms and conditions of service which holds the boss and servant to account. This, thus leaves the poor servants at the mercy of their bosses. Some bosses obviously treat their servants well, but most others treat these servants below what even a human being can imagine. In worst cases, these children resort to hawking, to earn a living, some join “okada” business on hire-purchase, some join commercial bus drivers as conductors while others join thuggery out rightly. Meanwhile, most of all the others would also end up as thugs in the city or fall back to their various villages.

There is the need for sustained actions from various stakeholders in this issue. The stakeholders here include, the parents, the masters (bosses), the apprentices, the market unions, business communities, local communities and the government. A model should be put in place to help in such situations. We need to start addressing this silent but yet glaring reality, hence the purpose of our campaign.

In order to understand these situations perfectly, we are going to build a scenario with a concept story. Though this story does not reflect a particular family, it is not entirely fictitious. It represents what we see in most families in every community in Igbo land as our survey would portray.

(Agency for Peace Education & Practice)

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