By Amaka Abayomi
Few people can appreciate the importance of street hawking to some families, especially the families of John Chinedu and Udo Ubong, The duo depend on daily income from street hawking of gala to feed and fund their education.

Government quest to  rid the streets and highways of  street hawkers, regarded as ‘miscreants’ is understandable; NGOs dedicate much energy into fighting child abuse; even armchair theorists see hawking as one of the indices to measure parental failure. Their position is understandable.

But  to these 20-something years old John and Udo, running after cars, buses, motorcycles and even Keke Marwa to market sausage rolls means living.  Traffic jams, to them, is what oases are to desert dwellers.

Both left their various villages for Lagos in search of the greener pastures, but were disappointed as the greener pastures soon became mirage.

Determined not to return to the village the way they came, they sought other means of keeping body and soul together, and at the same time, sending money to their families.

According to John, selling gala and other sausages became the easily available option for him after a long search for a meaningful job.

“After looking for work for a long time, I had to consider selling gala and other sausages to make ends meet. This is because I don’t need to have a shop to sell them and I have to contribute my share of the house rent.”

For Udo, hawking was his only option since he lacked the skills or educational qualification to seek better jobs.
He said: “I left the village after my father died because I want to make money to take care of my mother. Since I didn’t finish secondary school, looking for an office job was out of the question because I know I’m not qualified.”

Continuing, Udo said the business can be profitable, depending on the person’s ability to run and make sales.

“Since I don’t have a shop because I can’t afford to rent one, I sell in traffic jams and at bus stops. In fact, I always pray for traffic jams so that more people will buy Gala.

“I buy two cartons of mixed sausage rolls from retailers because I can’t afford to buy from the manufacturers.

“A carton of Gala, Bigi, Beefie, Superbite, whichever you want, is sold for N3,900 and there are 105 pieces in a carton. So I make a profit of N1,350 on every carton I sell. Depending on traffic conditions, I can sell two or more cartons daily. From this I send money to my family in the village and also use for my upkeep.”

John, who made one of the busy bus stops in Lagos his sales point, augments his income by selling ice-cream alongside the sausage rolls.

“This is because income from selling gala alone is not enough to take care of me and my family. Besides, people usually request for ice-cream because they use it to push down the gala or to cool their temperature in the hot weather.

“I sell mostly two cartons daily and more when there is scarcity of vehicles because the bus stop will be filled with a lot of hungry people who depend on gala till they get home.”

One major challenge both agree that hinders their sales is the activities of the Kick Against Indiscipline, KAI, task force who arrest them indiscriminately.

“Because government doesn’t want us to be hawking by the roadsides or in traffic, the KAI people arrest us and seize our goods. We then have to bail ourselves out but would have lost our goods.

“Government wants us to rent shops and be selling sausage rolls, but will hungry people who are stuck in traffic leave their cars and come to our shops to buy gala, or will someone at the bus stop start looking for a shop to buy gala from?”

Appealing to government to help make hawking more attractive to young school leavers, John and Udo said street hawking could reduce crime.

“But if KAI continues to seize our goods, hawking will become unattractive as most of us will not be able to fend for our families and this will lead to the increase in crime rate.

By Amaka Abayomi
“This is because there are a lot of able bodied young school leavers who are responsible for taking care of their families and they deserve the right to make legitimate income. But if they see that government is always seizing our goods, they will not want to take that risk. So a lot of them are taking to crime.”

That these young men have to come to accept their lot as bread winners is evident in the zeal with which they go about their business. Olympic athletes would envy the speed with which they go after customers on the highway.

Hawking world

It took four sweating and panting KAI officials to get one of such young hawkers into their ‘Black Maria’ at Iyana-Iba, close to LASU main gate in Lagos State, last week. This was after littering the road with the boy’s goods for cars to run over.