Dare Babalola
The Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA) has evacuated 607 beggars and mentally challenged individuals from Abuja streets as part of efforts to clean up the city, from July 2025 to date.
Ukachi Adebayo, Head of Enforcement, FCT Social Development Secretariat (SDS) made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Monday.
Adebayo said the Operation Sweep Abuja Clean team carried out the exercise, evacuating 607 individuals, comprising 583 beggars and 23 mentally challenged persons.
She added that the evacuees had been counselled, profiled, and returned to their states in collaboration with state governments and liaison offices.
“What we do when we apprehend the beggars and mentally challenged individuals is to counsel them to be able to profile them.
“After that, we take them to their various liaison offices to be returned to their respective states where they are expected to undergo rehabilitation,” she said.
Noting that the beggars and mentally challenged persons always returned to the streets after the evacuation, Adebayo said that the operation was ongoing and would continue to take them off the streets of Abuja.
She said, “The more you take them out; the more they resurface.
“Some of them were driven by insecurity in their state and they ran to Abuja to take refuge but we will continue to apprehend them and take them back.”
Similarly, Gloria Onwuka, acting Director, Social Welfare, SDS, said that some of the children begging on the streets were brought in from other states by unidentified individuals to beg and hand over the proceeds to them.
Onwuka added that some of the women that were caught with children, begging on their behalf were not their biological children.
“Begging is now run like a business. People will go and hire people’s children from other states, put them in vehicles very early in the morning, come to Abuja and start begging.
“The families they are hiring these children from don’t even know that this is what they are using their children to do.
“We have caught so many of them like that,” she said.
Also, Dr Peter Olumuji, Secretary, FCTA Command and Control Centre, explained that Operation Sweep was a joint security operation involving all relevant security agencies and FCT’s Secretariats, Departments and Agencies.
Olumuji stated that the operation was instituted by the FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, to sweep Abuja of miscreants, street beggars, scavengers and other criminal elements.
He pointed out that beggars pose security threats and constitute a nuisance in the city, adding that some of them serve as informants to criminals.
“Not only that, the beggars and mentally challenged individuals also deface the beauty of the capital city, while some of them become victims of kidnapping for rituals and other negative purposes,” he said.
He said that the operation was ongoing and would continue to crackdown on beggars, miscreants and other criminal elements wherever they resurfaced.
