By
Ibn Abdillah As-sudaisiy Al-Iloori
The first time I travelled to the core north was in 1993 when we went for National Musābaqah in Katsina, Katsina State. As small as I was then, my worst journey experience was seeing the Almajiri children with dirty clothes, unwashed plates in their hands begging for food. They wouldn’t bath or brush for days. If they fall sick, no one will take care of them. Some would even die on the streets and no one would ask of them. What kind of life is this? Where is humanity here?
During that journey, we started seeing them from Mokwa, Niger State till we got to Katsina. They could eat anything they find left over and share it among themselves no matter how little. If you are eating in a restaurant and you drink water without holding your food, that could be the end of your meal because their thought is you only drink water after eating, otherwise you will be deemed to have left it over for them. They used not to care about the difference in the foods. For instance, they can put rice together with “tuwo” and any other food available on the same plate without even washing it. They put rope on the plate and hang it on their necks. It was a terrible experience that I kept thinking about for years. Anyone who has witnessed these things can testify to it. The situation has still not changed. I still saw some of these boys a few weeks ago while I was on my way to Abuja.
Later in life, I discovered that one of the main causes of this problem is lack of parental responsibilities. It was not all of the children that are orphans. Even if they are all orphans, are there no ways Islām has taught us to deal with them? The laws are just there on papers without being applied. Apart from that, those who do not even qualify to marry one wife would marry up to four without proper shelters for wives and children. Hence, the push out of young innocent boys to fend for themselves. These boys go through hell without any form of education. They are treated like animals from childhood and abandoned on the streets. If rain is falling, no where to run to. If it is too sunny, they are just there. They mainly learn how to recite and memorize the Qur’ān and that is all. They hardly understand the true meaning of the Qur’ān some of them have memorized. This is one of the reasons some of them fell for the evil interpretations of the boko haram group and their likes. Islam is based on knowledge and knowledge must be acquired from the right sources.
Governments at various levels have their blames, but the buck of the blame is on the break-down of family system and lack of respect for the Islamic institution. The northern elites have failed woefully to tackle the menace of beggary in the region. Part of the style of politicians is to make people be at their mercy. They inflict hunger and poverty on people so that they can use them for cheap political gains. They neglect the immediate needs of people and embark on meaningless projects to syphon public funds. That is the way of an ordinary politician except very few. Funds that are meant to see to the welfare of Almajiri institutions are even embezzled by corrupt government officers.
One could reasonably foresee the repercussions of this problem to the whole nation and not just northern Nigeria. Though northern Nigeria is bearing much of the consequences in different forms (e.g. terrorism, banditry, kidnapping etc), the whole country is affected as travelling from one end of Nigeria to another is now very difficult. The money that is expected to go into infrastructural developments are now used to prosecute wars that could have been prevented if proper attention was paid to the application of the Islamic family in the affected regions. Other regions also have their peculiar problems. For instance, the rate at which the evils of prostitution, betting, drugs, intoxicants and cultism is growing among youths in Southwestern Nigeria is scary. But northern Nigeria is not also free from all these evils. Social media has also amplified these problems in many ways. Morality is dying in our society and we think we are fine.
Though there are various dimensions to the issue of Almajiri but the glaring truth is that the Northern region has since been nurturing the tools for this disaster in the numerous untrained and neglected young children. It is very easy to recruit anyone without any form of education for any form of evil. We need to all learn from this. If you train your own children thinking you are safe, the untrained children are just waiting to make life miserable and unlivable for you and your children.
The building of a society starts from home. To change this situation, all hands must be on deck to reform our society with proper and intentional application of the tenets of Islamic family law.
May Allāh guide us aright.
