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Disabled: When will the society come to their rescue?
2007-11-06 08:43:37
By Rayner Ngonji
The former Dar es salaam Regional Commissioner, Yusuf Makamba now CCM Secretary General, had at one time carried out an operation that left every sympathiser of the disabled reeling with astonishment.
He directed the city authorities to enact a by-law that would bar sympathizers from donating alms to the disabled.
He claimed that the move was part of his efforts to wipe out the outstanding practice of the disabled going round the streets begging.
He vowed to solve the problem once and for all. He said, `If you want to eliminate the beggars from Dar es Salaam streets, you have got to deal with their donors.`
`Otherwise they won`t leave,` he asserted, adding `that is why they continue flocking to the city almost everyday.`
The regional commissioner argued that if the alms were controlled and channeled through one institution, the beggars flow from the regions to the city would instead be minimised.
The problem with beggars in Dar es Salaam is not the system of offering alms direct to the recipients, but rather the complete lack of a guaranteed mechanism of their basic needs supply.
That includes ofcourse the modalities of presenting the alms.
The disabled would like very much, I believe, to remain in the camps instead of shuttling from one street to the other soliciting for alms.
But once they do that they will starve. No food, not a single tiny morsel, nothing whatsoever would find its way to them.
One of the beggars emphasized that they are ready to stay in the camps, if at all they still exist, but the problem developes when they don’t have anything to eat and no one comes to their rescue.
`That is when we are forced to go to the streets ourselves to look for food,` notes one beggar who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal.
Another disabled who also spends time roaming about the streets seeking donations, admits that the practice is bad and awkward. However, she says they have to do it by force of circumstances.
She says if there is any better system of taking alms and other contributions to them, without any hitches, then, the government should introduce it.
It is therefore evident that the problem of beggars in the `Haven of Peace` and other Tanzanian municipalities and towns is not the manner under which the alms are supplied, but the procurement of their basic needs.
The RC would have been better understood if he had come up with the best approach of collecting the alms and the taking them to the disabled in the camps before rushing to enact a ramshackle law, that would anyway be impossible to enforce.
After all these people have not asked for that condition but have been born so by the powers of the Almighty. Hence they deserve our love and sympathy and not harassment.
Banning the so called donors from making contributions for the disabled does not solve the problem but aims at frustrating good intention of Samaritans thereby create chaos and punish the disabled for a ‘mistake’ which they didn`t commit.
Experience has all along shown that it has been a bit difficult for contributions made genuinely by sympathisers to reach the targeted people, for example disaster victims.
During floods or any major disaster, not all contributions made reach the victims. Some go astray on their way through the maze of the Bongo`s bureaucracy.
Makamba and other dignitaries at the echelon know very well and perhaps still remember what happened to the distribution of plots earmarked for the displaced persons from the flood prone areas in the city`s lowlands.
About 400 plots found their way to some of the city officials themselves instead of the targeted people, subsequently forcing his office to suspend the whole programme.
Unfortunately none of the officials has been taken to task. That happened with something which has nothing to do with one`s survival.
Nobody knows what will happen to things like money, clothes, food, shoes, bed sheets and others if these were to be channeled in the way the esteemed RC wants.
If indeed Mr Makamba was committed to eradicating the beggars, he should have come with a suggestion that the task of collecting the contributions for the disabled and taking them to the camps should be assigned to charitable organisations like Caritas and Red cross.
These two organisations are well placed for the exercise.
They have experience and clean records of rendering such services because they are the ones usually used to distribute a variety of aid during floods and famine and nobody has ever complained about their services.
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