Almajiri are victims not criminals – Abdullahi

Former minister of Sports and Youths, former spokesperson of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi has said that the Almajiris are victims not criminals and a cultural practice that have gone very wrong.

Abdullahi said what is going on regarding the Almajiri children being deported by some governor to their state of origin is quite tragic and a disgrace to the country.

He also said that its time for Nigeria to come up with a national strategy for socially dislocated children.

He lamented that no Nigerian state governor has the power to forcefully remove or deport any Nigerian citizen, against his/her will, to another state when he has not been convicted of any crime.

Further he said that if the system justified it in the past, it cannot do so now. Does a Nigerian state governor have the power to forcefully remove or deport Nigerian citizen, against his will, to another state when he has not been convicted of any crime? The answer is no; even as I am not a lawyer, yet, today, we hear that some governors are deporting citizens from one state to the other, forgetting that they are Nigerian children.

However, I think it is about time we came up with a national strategy for dealing with socially dislocated children. We can call them Almajiri, but they are socially dislocated children.

And even if we behave as if they are not Nigerian children, we cannot wish them away as one.

The governors can remove them from their states, but cannot wish them away as Nigerian children. We have to handle it the holistic way like desertification.

We have to adopt regional approach in handling Almajiri.

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The northern governors must form a coalition to tackle the menace.

Deporting them is a disgrace to the country. They must make it their number one agenda at one of their meetings.

It is good to build schools for them, but the challenge we must recognise is that, that they are not in school in the first place is not because there are no schools for them to attend, but because of the fundamental reason that existed previously.

We need to go beyond just building the school to changing their mentality that does not embrace schooling.

We need to go beyond giving them food, but come up with programme deliberately targeted at them. If I use my bias, I think sports should be a major entry point towards dealing with Almajiri problem.

If we can engage these children in sporting activities, like putting about 100 of them in sports academy, allowing them to learn Koran if they want to and once they are rattled by their inability to count game scores because they cannot read numbers, they will have reason to want to learn numbers and write things down thereby embarking on education. The governors should just set up sports centres across the Northern region where you have Almajiri problem.

Engaging them in sports can remove them from the streets and before long many of them will start winning laurels for the country.