00:01How many children do you meet a day begging on the streets of Lagos?
00:04Take a moment to look at this photograph.
00:05A child standing in traffic, placard in hand, waiting for the next car to stop.
00:09Could be mistaken for Lagos in 2026.
00:11But it is not.
00:13The photograph was actually taken in 1988.
00:15Almost four decades have passed.
00:17Yet, the distance between then and now feels surprisingly small.
00:20What may have begun as an act of desperation slowly became something more enduring.
00:25As a hardship deepened in the country, for some families, desperation eventually put children on the streets.
00:31Not by choice, but by necessity.
00:33But poverty is really the whole story.
00:35I mean, by now, we all know that.
00:37Children became the face of begging because they awakened something instinctive in us.
00:41Reports appointed to organized begging rings where children, even infants, are used to draw sympathy.
00:47While adults remain close enough in the shadows to collect the money and send them back into the traffic.
00:52The real cost isn't what passes through the car windows.
00:55It's their childhood stolen while standing there.
00:58Many four decades separates 1988 from 2026.
01:02Yet, one image still connects them.
01:04A child standing in traffic.
01:05A good photograph can preserve the moment.
01:08But this one preserves the question.
01:10How many more years must pass before no child has to grow up in the middle of the road?
01:13A child
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