“The Almajiri system, historically rooted in Northern Nigeria's precolonial Islamic scholarship, has devolved into a complex humanitarian crisis. Once a revered educational tradition, the system is now associated with street begging, child neglect, disease vulnerability, and radicalization risks”.(Saifullahi Idris Umar & Sadiq Muhammad Maaji; From sacred education to street exploitation: the Almajiri Crisis in Nigeria as a nexus of public health failures, legal paralysis, and global security risk, 2025)
Children everywhere begging, no education, no hygiene, no medical care, no home training etc. It is the failure of a society preparing for a terrible future. These children will grow to become a problem to others who are fortunate not to belong to the group.
Government come and go with no solution to this nemesis. Agencies upon agencies are set up to look into this malady, allocations to curb the menace are budgeted every time, programs are initiated with good goals on paper but rather than getting better, it kept growing worse. More children litter the streets, tattered and worn out begging for daily bread as if it is their responsibility.
Most of the children, from KastinaMirror’s findings, are from other states. Their parents put them in a vehicle and send them across to a neighbouring or far away state without provision or expectation to return anytime soon giving the children the impression they will fare better in the place they are sent only to discover that they were sent to labour without earning a dime.
We need a sincere government that will take the bull by the horn. Arrests the children, locate the parents or the guardian and prosecute them for punishing these innocent children and possibly educate and empower them to have the capacity to care for their children.
There’s no excuse for parents to give birth to children they can’t cater for neither is there any excuse for government to ignore these ills with the idea that they are doing their best in other sectors.
The exploitation of these children is enough to judge a government as incompetent. There is campaign everywhere for politicians to be voted in but campaign to stop child labour is too expensive for a society that is yearning for peace and progress.
Some of these children who are now grown today are into banditry, kidnapping, drug abuse and criminalities that robs us of the peace and progress we desire.
When a relative sends his child into such ventures, how many neighbours bothered to ask the parents where their children were sent or even discourage them if they bother to inform them.
The society needs to build a resistance against this repressive system that seems to raise children that will grow to hate the society in which they are raised to become an enemy rather than contribute to the development of that society.
Government need to stop creating unnecessary conduits for siphoning money while pretending to care for these almajiris and out of school children to start making policies that will quell the fundamental problem proffering solutions to an already dire situation in our hand.
Free education is not too expensive considering how much is wasted to governance, political events, entertainment, sports etc. that are not as important as this humanitarian crisis resulting from children left in the cold to suffer on the streets for nothing.
All these many agencies squandering funds with no single almajiri, out of school children or their parents represented should be closed to engage the owners of tsangayas in the north, the people in the slums in the south, as well as the poorest of the poorest on the way forward so that we don’t build a society of exploited children that will grow thick skin for revenge on the people around them in the future.