Abia State Government has vowed to prosecute parents and guardians whose children are caught hawking on the streets of the state.
The state’s Commissioner for Education, Professor Ikechi Mgbeoji, who made this known while presenting a paper entitled The Nigeria Child on the Street: Its implication for the Future of the Country, at the launch of “Save the Street Child Aba Initiative” by the National Association of Seadogs Pirates Confraternity in Aba, added that a mobile education court, specially designed for education-related offences, would be set up.
He insisted that no child in the state has a reason not to use the opportunity offered by the government to access primary and secondary education.
Mgbeoji further stated that the state was also proposing an Education Summit to discuss and propose an Education Bill to be passed into law before year’s end, stressing that the bill, when passed into law, will treat street hawking by children as a crime as obtainable in some states of the federation.
Earlier in his address, Capon of the National Association of Seadogs, NAS, Aba chapter, Mr. Christopher Joseph, said that the theme of the event, Open Identity; Every Child Deserves a Secure Future, was aimed at highlighting the pains, sufferings and dangers faced by street children daily in Aba and to seek ways of securing conducive environment where “these children can grow, become happy, useful and productive members of the society.” Vanguard
