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.. PHOTO|FILE
By Saumu Mwalimu The Citizen Reporter
In Summary
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.
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.
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