PeacePro Warns Almajiri System Fuels Insecurity, Calls for Urgent Five-Year Reform

The Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) has warned that Nigeria’s worsening insecurity will remain unresolved unless the Almajiri system is decisively dismantled within the next five years. The organisation cautioned that continued neglect of the system could destabilise not only Nigeria but the wider West African subregion.

The warning was issued by PeacePro’s Executive Director, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, following a fact-finding and stakeholder engagement tour across seven states in Northern Nigeria. According to him, the engagements revealed a disturbing pattern of normalised child abandonment, often justified on cultural and religious grounds, which has produced millions of socially excluded children.

Hamzat said the crisis goes beyond banditry and terrorism, describing it as the long-term outcome of a society that has failed its children. He argued that the Almajiri system, in its current form, represents a deep societal breakdown involving families, religion, culture, government and the wider community.

PeacePro warned that failure to eradicate the system within five years could lead to an uncontrollable spread of insecurity across borders. Hamzat noted that the growing population of uneducated, unprotected and desperate youths provides fertile ground for recruitment by criminal gangs, extremist groups and violent political networks.

While acknowledging that the Almajiri system is often defended as a cultural or religious tradition, the organisation insisted that culture loses its legitimacy when it consistently produces deprivation, homelessness and social alienation. Hamzat stressed that PeacePro’s position is not an attack on Islam or Northern culture but a call for reforms anchored on dignity, welfare and accountability.

The group identified five layers of failure driving the crisis: family abandonment, ethnic and cultural normalisation, religious neglect of child welfare, societal acceptance of child begging, and weak enforcement of child rights laws by the state.

PeacePro called on federal and state governments to declare the Almajiri crisis a national emergency and security priority. It recommended coordinated reforms, large-scale rehabilitation and vocational programmes, and sustained engagement with religious and traditional leaders to end the cycle of child neglect and insecurity.