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This article takes field surveys as a basis for building an understanding of the ambivalence found in the relations between public authorities and street children in Lubumbashi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Examination is made of the discourses and practices of administrative authorities, police officers and street children in an attempt to bring the dynamics of their daily social relations into relief. This reveals the margin of manoeuvre the street children manage to negotiate in the city’s political sphere. And local councillors and law enforcement officers try at the same time to control and manipulate this force. It transpires therefore that the relation between the three parties stems less from a dialectic of domination and resistance, or from a logic of connivance, than from a game of reciprocity, having sometimes sometimes positive, sometimes negative effects.