Vagrants on our streets, a cause for concern

Editor: A vagrant is a person who is poor, does not have a home or job, and moves from place to place.

The issues of vagrants in St Vincent and the Grenadines is a serious cause for concern and it must be taken seriously by the NDP, ULP, or whichever political parties that have ambitions of running the affairs of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

The vagrants are on the streets for many reasons. Some are on the streets because of drug abuse, mental illness, abandonment by family members and they have nowhere to live. Walking through the streets of Kingstown you would be bombarded by vagrants begging for money and food. Some vagrants, when they beg for money and you don’t give them, want to slap and fight you for your own money. Tourists walking through the streets and vagrants can be seen harassing them for money. This can deter tourists from visiting our country. Gone are the days when vagrants used to be begging for a dollar, they are now asking for ten dollars, soap, toothpaste and food.

Persons have to be extremely careful when giving these vagrants money because some would take your money and buy cocaine and marijuana from the drug dealers. Some vagrants would dispose a lot of garbage from garbage bins in the streets which makes the streets unsightly and contributes to littering. Business owners usually have to deal with vagrants. Vagrants would sleep outside businesses and the scent of urine and faeces would greet you on entering these businesses which can deter customers from shopping at these business places, resulting in a loss of income for business owners. Customers also have to be skipping over these vagrants to enter these businesses. Some vagrants can also be seen with their faeces and urine walking through the streets in a bottle, which is very disgusting and unsanitary.

The beautiful ladies of St. Vincent and the Grenadines are sometimes sexually harassed by some vagrants. I remembered seeing a vagrant on many occasions taking out his private part and masturbating behind females when they walk through the streets. This particular vagrant would also touch female’s bottom in the streets.

Females should be able to walk through the streets without being sexually harassed. Can you envision if this vagrant was to rape your young daughter? The vagrants on the streets with mental problems must be given urgent attention. We cannot have vagrants with mental illness roaming the streets and knocking down our loved ones with objects and sometimes killing them. On December 2nd 2021, a mentally challenged man attacked three people with a metal pipe in Kingstown, resulting in the death [of one of his victims].

When you are in the streets and you spot these vagrants, you must watch them with a “lizard eye” because you never know if they might sneak up on you and hit you with an object. We must have “all hands on deck” to deal with the serious issues of vagrants. All politicians and the rest of society must unite and find solutions for keeping these vagrants off the streets. I would recommend having a proper facility built and fenced that can house all these vagrants, where they can get the urgent help they need and they would be able to get different meals per day. The facility should also have persons to monitor the vagrants, to ensure they do not leave the facility.

Kimani Wiseman