- Gov. Ganduje’s claim that most Almajirai are from outside implies the system is out of date
The almajiri system has continued to be a hobgoblin. This much came out of the lips of the governor of Kano State, Umar Ganduje, when he asserted that most of them come from outside the country. Said he: “From the survey we have conducted, most of the almajirai roaming our streets are from Niger, Chad and the northern part of Cameroun.”
It is a fact some Nigerians had suspected. Even at that, few thought that they constitute the majority of the street urchins of the north. This revelation presumes that the governor had his facts before he uttered them. He also said it was no whimsical notion. He said it issued out of survey. He did not elaborate on the survey. We have no sense of its scientific methodology, no knowledge of how vast the survey was or how recent, and who conducted it. But we have to assume that his words are wedded to the facts.
However, we have seen, in the past decades, instances of violence in the north traced to migrants from Chad, Cameroun and Niger. The herdsmen crisis, for instance, has been especially fraught with suspicions and hard facts pointing to the perpetrators as foreigners from the West African sub-region.
The reason the survey is important is because of the rootlessness of the boys. They are uprooted early from family. They grow knowing no kin. Fathers and mothers do not give them the nurture, care and protection of parenthood. This makes the population somewhat amorphous without any way to identify who is a local or foreigner. They all speak the Hausa language, the same accents and confess to the same faith. They also look the same, like people bred from the same home because of the geo-cultural affinity of the sub-region.
We would urge the governor to unveil the facts of the survey for rigorous examination and contexts. We know that the governor has been very wary of the boys and has treated the migration of the urchins across states with prejudice. In fact, northern governors have been trying to come to grips with dealing with the waves of almajirai into their states. They tend to flock into states like Ganduje’s Kano where they anticipate better prospects of regular food and board.
But more striking in what Ganduje noted was that efforts to improve the almajiri system are a magnet for better migration of the boys from outside the country. This creates a dilemma. To improve it is to worsen the situation. It attracts them from Niger, Chad and Northern Cameroun, burdens budgets and food rations, homeless situation, and ultimately security.
If to improve is to worsen, it means the almajiri system is no longer sustainable, and should go. Some governors have said parents should take care of their children and should yield to the convenience of letting a footloose system wreck their offspring. It has yet not worked.
Meanwhile, in spite of the shutter policy, the borders are still open to the boys. No policy has been able to hold off the marauders who now have imprinted violence in our lives. If the almajirai are in the majority, it means we also breed them as menace in our midst.
The system has been with us for over a century. They started in the northeast as noble religious projects to multiply clerics. But it has turned into an exploitative institution. The boys are now mendicants. They grow into political tools used for violence. The Boko Haram problem grew from such false comfort.
We have to stop that system, and that perhaps is what Governor Ganduje’s revelation implies.
