Redefining Perspectives: Empowering Nigeria’s Area Boys as Catalysts for Positive Change.

In Nigeria, we have area boys, also known as agberos loitering the streets. They are loosely organized gangs of street teenagers and adult males operating in various cities of the Country, but predominantly in Lagos. They have even metamorphosed to “Omonile’s” meaning sons of the soil and insist that anyone who buys land in Lagos must settle them before being allowed to build on the land.

Most of them are indigent school dropouts who are notorious for extorting money from anyone as much as they can, pick pockets, snatch bags and phones, peddle drugs, and during elections becoming election thugs for financial compensation. During the “ENDSARS” protest, they broke into almost all the shops in the metropolis, particularly Shoprite, and carted away almost all the goods. You can park your car to go into the market or into a building and come out to see an area boy waiting for you, insisting that you have to pay him for parking, on land that does not belong to him and he has no right to. If you refuse to pay, they can destroy your car, maim you or even kill you.

If you ask the question why they do the things they do, you will see POVERTY starring at you in the face. Most parents cannot afford to send their Children to School. Unemployment for graduates is high, let alone, those who have not witnessed the four walls of a school. These young men move around, believing that the world is against them and that they have to be in a constant battle with the affluent in society. They are indeed products of Social deprivation.

Some of them have had to go to jail wrongly and they went there and became hardened criminals. Some of them have been victims of societal ills like one of them told us how he was robbed and in turn, he decided to start robbing people.

Based on their brutality and terrorizing actions, they have become stigmatized for their criminality.  They look dirty and use foul words and uncooked language but interestingly, these same area boys when put to good use such as the organization of parties, function well.

Rhapsody of Experiences Youth and Women Empowerment Foundation has seen the need to humanize these Street boys and men and so, we have embarked on feeding them every week and on looking for ways to educate them and teach them skills that will make them self-reliant and Independent. We acknowledge their humanity and want to move them from being tools of violence to being agents of change and global citizens.

We arranged meetings to talk to some of them to understand their fundamental composition before embarking on the herculean task of assisting them to make their lives better. We found out that they all had their stories and they all had hopes and dreams. Shattered hopes. Crushed dreams. We found out that it was circumstances that made them to become as they now are and everything boiled down to poverty. Some of them grew up in homes that could not fend for them. Some of them had parents who were on drugs and were jailed or parents who had died early due to various diseases. I don’t think anybody wakes up and decides they want to be an area boy. Some of them had relatives who did not care about them and some of them did not even know their parents. A lot of them were given out as house helpers but ran away due to maltreatment from the people they were living with.

When you talk to these “agberos”, you will realize the role that fate and circumstances, play in individual lives.

Area boys are a menace to society but if we collectively feel a sense of responsibility towards them, their lot will change.

Join Rhapsody of Experiences in this all-important movement to support them.

Donate, so we can get them off the Streets. Donate, so we can create equal opportunity for them to prevent them from continued marginalization that will enable us interact and co-exist with them peacefully.