Nigeria is one of the few countries where poverty is not just a social problem; it is a well-organised industry. And at the centre of this industry, roaming our streets like unpaid ambassadors of state failure, is the Almajiri child: barefoot, bowl in hand, eyes trained not on the future but on survival.
Nation-building, we are told by development theorists, begins with human capital. Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker insist that education is not charity; it is investment. Amartya Sen goes further, arguing that development is freedom; the freedom to think, to choose, to live beyond hunger. But in Northern Nigeria, freedom has been outsourced and education has been suspended indefinitely in the name of tradition, piety and political convenience.
The Almajiri system, once a modest religious arrangement, has been weaponised. What used to be Quranic instruction has metamorphosed into an out-of-school philosophy; a cultural rationalisation for mass illiteracy. The child is taught to memorise Islamic scriptures but denied literacy, numeracy and civic sense. He learns verses but not value; obedience but not opportunity.
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In international development, this is called structural violence; a condition where social structures harm people by preventing them from meeting basic needs. Johan Galtung did not have Northern Nigeria in mind when he coined the term, but the shoe fits painfully well.
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Former President Goodluck Jonathan, to his credit, attempted a rare experiment in sanity. He built Almajiri schools: brick-and-mortar evidence that someone in Abuja still believed that Northern children deserved classrooms, not sidewalks. But what happened? Northern political elites rejected them. Some called them “Western contamination.” Others quietly abandoned them to rot. A few governors treated them like unwanted stepchildren; built with federal money but orphaned by local irresponsibility.
Why educate a child who can be more useful uneducated?
An uneducated Almajiri is cheap political labour. He can be mobilised during elections, handed a plate of food, a slogan, and sometimes a cutlass. In the darker corners of insecurity, he becomes raw material for extremism. Development scholars call this elite capture, a system where public policy is hijacked by those in power for private or political gain. In Northern Nigeria, the elite has captured poverty itself.
These children drift from Kano to Maiduguri, from Sokoto to Jos, from Zaria to the Middle Belt; visible everywhere, protected nowhere. They beg in front of government houses whose occupants preach morality on television while outsourcing responsibility to fate and Allah. Religion becomes the alibi for governance failure. God is blamed for what governors refuse to fix.
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Walt Rostow’s stages of economic growth argue that societies must pass through education to driven takeoff to reach development. Northern Nigeria, however, has chosen permanent pre-takeoff; a developmental limbo where leaders fear that education may produce citizens who ask questions.
And that is the real fear.
An educated child asks why budgets disappear.
An educated child asks why governors build flyovers but ignore schools.
An educated child asks why religion is loud but justice is silent.
So the Almajiri must remain roaming and visible proof of piety, invisible victims of policy. They are paraded as symbols of religious devotion while being denied the very dignity that religion claims to protect.
Nation-building cannot occur when a region mass-produces children with no stake in the nation. You cannot build a country on empty stomachs and empty classrooms. You cannot preach unity while manufacturing exclusion. You cannot fight terrorism while feeding it with neglect.
The tragedy is not that the Almajiri exists. The tragedy is that he is deliberately maintained.
Until Northern leaders stop confusing governance with sermons, and tradition with stagnation, the Almajiri will remain Nigeria’s most biting satire; one that writes itself daily on our streets, in our markets and at our traffic junctions.
And no nation has ever developed by turning its children into footnotes.
Olalekan Olabamiji writes from Abuja
