Fraudsters pose as ordinary beggars in Dar

Dar es Salaam. Being led up the garden path: that’s the fate that befalls quite many compassionate people at the hands of make-believe beggars who con them of often hard-earned money, and then, most probably, feel heroic over turning the benefactors into big fools.

Being the country’s commercial nerve-centre that’s teeming with thousands of income-earners, Dar es Salaam city, and its environs, is the choice theatre in which the cheats, cashing in on human sympathy, stage the drama that takes various forms.

A smartly-dressed gentleman approaches you, greets you respectfully and then, tearfully, tells you that he has been reduced to pennilessness after losing his wallet during a scramble to board a daladala commuter bus; but fortunately, his ATM card was in a separate pocket. So, he pleads for a “just Sh500 rescue” to enable him reach an ATM facility to withdraw some cash.

Touched by the man’s plight, and reinforced by memories of having suffered a similar fate yourself, and been assisted by someone; or, the likelihood of becoming a victim someday, you help the person, who showers you with praises, for which your conscience feels enriched.

Unknown to many, though, the presumed gentleman – who is replicated by scores of tricksters – gets (doesn’t earn, in the strict sense of the term) thousands of shillings through that cooked sympathy-eliciting story being multiplied several times, and producing ‘positive’ results.

ATM facility compounds host conmen who cook up tales of their cards having been swallowed up by the machines, and who beg for fare back home or offices, to await the dawn of the next day, when they would pursue retrievals of the cards. For them, too, sympathisers are plentiful; and this translates into good, ‘manna-from-heaven’ type money, when bits like Sh500 and Sh1,000 are multiplied by so much…

Babies, precious creatures branded tiny angels, are manipulated by crooked women to reap where they don’t really sow. It’s mid-evening. A woman projecting an outlook of low financial means (wrapped in cheap khanga or kitenge prints, wearing bathroom slippers and lacking facial make-up) approaches you. She points to a shabbily-dressed baby she’s carrying, and sorrowfully laments that he hasn’t eaten and drunk anything substantial since morning.

You are touched and easily part with some money, probably jolted by an inner-voice that warns you that being a regular beer drinker, it would be sinful and shameful to not help a baby in dire need, while you delightfully spend money on alcohol.

You may, alternatively, bump into a woman with a baby strapped on her back, who she says is sick, and produces, as evidence, medical documents, the most important of which is a prescription for drugs for which she is seeking money to buy from private pharmacy.

Again, unbeknown to you, the woman isn’t even the baby’s mother; she borrows him from the real mother who is a friend or relative as a bait for making money , part of which is paid to the ‘lender’ as a fee, like someone would be paid for part-time use of his hammer.

When a forlorn-looking middle-aged man hobbles his way to an institution like, say, a school seeking financial assistance for treating a leg encased in a PoP, the community in there is programmed into action: they fund-raise towards easing the plight of the person whose genuineness is supported by both documents bearing letter-heads of respectable medical institutions and an introduction from his local government leader

But the man is simply putting up a show, and, when a few of those he had conned spot him as a physically fit person sipping a drink at neighbourhood joints and blow the whistle, he shifts the show to a faraway location.

In the not-so-distant past, a photographer captured ‘before-and-after’ scenes of a would-be physically disabled beggar curled on a pavement, who subsequently walked majestically away after, well, working hours.

In residential neighbourhoods, some chaps who move around with exercise books in which people jot down entries of their names and amounts of money donated for soccer teams gearing up for matches.

Benevolent soccer fans help out, driven by the spirit to groom local talents. Some donors get worked up when they realise that they have drained money into the pits of non-existent soccer teams.

While the debate on the moral justification of begging and giving alms persists, the spirit of some genuine ‘donors’ is dampened by the cheats amongst the begging community; the perception being that all beggars are real or potential cheats.

Salmin Ali told The Citizen on Saturday that she used to be deeply moved by the plight of beggars , but was put off after a few encounters with cheats, citing, as an illustration, the case of a young man who had said he was on the verge of starvation due to a financial emergency that had cropped up on a particular day.

He narrated: “I bought food for him at a restaurant, but was shocked when I spotted him in different restaurants on a similar mission; and then, I reconnected with him at the venue of the first encounter, and, apparently due to poor memory, he presented the case as though it were fresh !”

Zahara Msumi narrated two separate encounters with a woman who pleaded with her to be her savior, lunch-wise, at Mwenge and New Post Office daladala bus terminals. Physically fit and smartly dressed, she noted, the woman could earn a livelihood decently, but degraded herself by begging.

The Citizen on Saturday has also learnt that, some young people elicit public sympathy by roaming around with copies of academic and professional training certificates, and pouncing on people for financial assistance, using joblessness as a bait.

The government’s on-and-off campaigns to rid the city of beggars, and which, moreover, targets street alms-seekers but doesn’t extend to fraudsters, don’t produce satisfactory results.

A few months ago, more than 300 beggars were taken to court and the government said they would be deported to their home villages. After a few months, and even weeks, they sneak back to the city and it’s business as usual; some of them reportedly earning more than low-income earning public servants; as it is, for the not-so-easily-detectable fraudsters.

Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) Ahmed Msangi attributes the begging culture to moral erosion and lack of self-esteem. Majority of the beggars do not see the available opportunities around them, he said, pointing out that Tanzania was blessed with land which everyone was free to till.

He said, for instance, that someone could start a plot for planting trees, or do so as groups. “The desire to live in cities, even as layabouts, is highly disgraceful,” ACP Msangi remarked.