The Almajiri crisis and the endless supply chain of terror in Nigeria
In December 2024, ISWAP released a propaganda video titled “Empowerment Generation 2” showing children as young as ten undergoing combat training and executing captives. In February 2021, Boko Haram released footage tagged “Next Generation Fighters” where child soldiers were being trained with AK-47 rifles. These are not isolated incidents. They are the logical endpoint of a system we have refused to dismantle: the Almajiri system, Northern Nigeria’s decades-old conveyor belt churning out millions of broken, brutalized children directly into the hands of terrorist recruiters.
This is the reality Nigeria continues to ignore.
Ten million children exist within this system, constituting 81 per cent of Nigeria’s out-of-school children. These are boys aged four to twelve, shipped away from their families to beg six hours a day while receiving sporadic Quranic instruction. They sleep on the streets. They are malnourished, diseased, and abandoned. Then we act shocked when they become foot soldiers for Boko Haram and ISWAP.
Research explicitly identifies the Almajiri system as the biggest source of recruitment for insurgency in Northeast Nigeria. Terrorist organizations target these children because the system has pre-broken them physically, psychologically, economically.
What do we offer these children? Hunger. Abuse. A bowl to beg with. What do terror groups offer? Food. Shelter. Purpose. When a starving thirteen-year-old is approached with promises of three meals and community, what choice does he have? We created that vulnerability. Then we fight the symptoms while refusing to address the cause.
As at 2008, Kano State alone had over 1,560,611 Almajirai, with significant numbers from Niger, Chad and Northern Cameroon. We are creating a regional security crisis, a cross-border pipeline of vulnerable recruits for extremist networks.
This system is state-sanctioned child abandonment. Parents discard their children and face zero consequences. This is child trafficking disguised as religious tradition. Any country serious about its children would criminalize this. But Nigeria does not. We celebrate it as culture, as if tradition justifies brutality.
Where are the laws holding parents accountable? Where are the prosecutions for abandonment? For consigning children to begging that leads to drug addiction, petty crime, and recruitment by armed groups? We prosecute parents for far less, but when wrapped in religion and relegated to the North, accountability vanishes.
In a 2010 CNN report, a young man from Niger revealed how the schools use children as foot soldiers in religious clashes. “I blame my Quranic teacher, who sent me to fight during the riots,” he told CNN. He lost his arm in 2000 in religious violence that killed about 1,000 people in Kaduna. Almajirai have evolved into urban criminals: pickpockets, car hijackers, surveillance operatives. They abuse drugs, inhaling toilet sewages to get high, sniffing glue, abusing Tramadol. These children become perfect replacements for political thugs and terrorist recruits.
Goodluck Jonathan understood the threat. As president, he built around 157 Tsangaya Model Schools nationwide, reportedly spending N15 billion. The project could have been transformative.
It was sabotaged.
Northern governors deliberately undermined the project. Some felt Jonathan was overstepping, resulting in no coordination between federal and state governments. Communities and religious experts fiercely opposed these reforms. Jonathan confirmed governors were unhappy but only revealed their displeasure after leaving office. Today, most schools are repurposed or lying in ruins.
This is the pattern; attempt reform, face resistance from those whose children are being destroyed, abandon the reform. Repeat.
The North must confront what its refusal costs. About 69% of Nigeria’s 13.2 million out-of-school children are from Northern Nigeria. The North is systematically destroying its demographic advantage. These millions represent the region’s future workforce. Instead, they are being converted into a lost generation: unemployable, traumatized, vulnerable to radicalization.
The annihilation of Northern Nigeria is not a future threat. It is in progress. Areas remain under siege from bandits and terrorists whose ranks are refreshed by vulnerable children this system produces. Roads are impassable. Villages are abandoned. And still, we churn out more Almajirai, more street boys, more recruitment fodder.
UNICEF estimates thousands of child soldiers have been recruited by Boko Haram between 2009 and 2022. About 200 boys graduated from ISWAP training camps in February 2022, with about 50 camps on Lake Chad islands training youth from Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Former child soldiers revealed that while ISWAP videos show children being well fed to attract others, the reality is different.
Yet the system persists because addressing it would require Northern elites to confront uncomfortable truths about culture, religion, and complicity. It is easier to frame reform as Western interference than to acknowledge millions of children are being brutalized under a system that serves terrorist recruiters.
The solution exists. It requires political will, accountability, and honesty.
First, enact laws criminalizing child abandonment in the guise of religious education. Parents who send children away must be held responsible or face prosecution. No exceptions, no cultural exemptions.
Second, dismantle the unregulated Almajiri system and replace it with integrated schools combining Quranic and secular education. This was Jonathan’s vision. It can work if Northern governors don’t sabotage it.
Third, acknowledge that every day this system persists, we are recruiting for terrorist organizations. Boko Haram and ISWAP target malnourished Almajiri children, feed them, then train them as combatants. As long as we maintain millions of vulnerable street children, terrorist groups will never lack recruits.
This is not a religious issue. This is a child welfare crisis. This is a national security emergency.
The North cannot claim to value its children while systematically destroying them. The rest of Nigeria cannot claim moral authority while watching this unfold. Every child begging on the streets of Kano, Sokoto, Maiduguri, and Yobe is a child we failed. Some are being trained in forests right now, preparing to return as armed combatants.
The war we fear is already here. We are manufacturing its soldiers ourselves, one abandoned child at a time.
Ndi Kato is a political analyst, commentator and gender advocate challenging the systems that shape governance and social progress
