The Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) has warned that Nigeria’s worsening insecurity would remain unresolved unless the Almajiri system is decisively dismantled within the next five years.
The executive director of PeacePro, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, sounded the note of warning during an interview with LEADERSHIP in Ilorin, Kwara State.
Hamzat cautioned that continued neglect of the crisis could destabilise not only Nigeria but the entire West African subregion.
He said this warning followed an extensive fact-finding and engagement tour of seven states across northern Nigeria, where his organisation interacted with a wide range of stakeholders on issues of insecurity and the Almajiri crisis.
He added that the tour exposed a disturbing and consistent pattern of normalised child abandonment, cloaked in cultural and religious justification, which has produced millions of socially excluded children and continued to fuel banditry, extremism, and organised criminal violence.
“What Nigeria is dealing with is not just banditry, terrorism, or criminality. It is the long-term consequence of a society that has normalised the abandonment of its children. The Almajiri system, in its current form, is not merely a policy failure; it is a cultural expression of total societal collapse,” he said.
Hamzat described the situation as a composite failure cutting across all layers of society, adding that: “It is a failure of culture, a failure of family, a failure of religion, a failure of government, and a failure of society, all rolled into one.”
“If this crisis is allowed to persist, Nigeria will not burn alone. The sheer scale of excluded, uneducated, and desperate youths being produced annually is enough to set the entire West African subregion on fire,” Hamzat warned.
While acknowledging that the Almajiri system is often defended as culture or religious tradition, Hamzat insisted that culture loses moral legitimacy when it systematically produces deprivation, homelessness, and social alienation.
“Culture is not sacred when it destroys lives. Any culture that turns children into roaming beggars denies them education, welfare, protection, and a sense of belonging is no longer heritage, it is a social pathology,” Hamzat added.
