by Mohammed Bello Doka
16 June, 2026.
For decades, we have searched for the sources of the North's unending tragedy. We have pointed fingers at poverty, at the federal government, at the weather, at colonialism, and at every scapegoat imaginable. Yet the bandits still come. The kidnappers still strike. The children still starve. And the silence from our leaders remains deafening. The bitter truth that no one wants to speak is this: the major cause of the moral decay and the tragedy we find ourselves in today is the complete and total breakdown of the traditional family system. Until we fix what is broken in our homes, in our values, and in our souls, there will never be peace in the North.
Consider the evidence of our moral collapse. A Fulani herdsman, who a few decades ago could not eat in public for sheer shame and modesty, today will rape a woman on camera and walk free. Reports in 2025 from Benue State confirmed that Fulani herdsmen have been terrorizing communities, raping women and committing other atrocities, with one woman, Nguevese Abite of Adeor community, killed when she resisted her attackers‘ attempt to rape her. In Enugu, women protested in the streets, sharing harrowing accounts of being raped, beaten, and mutilated by herdsmen, crying out, “Our women are being raped, our husbands and sons can’t go to farm anymore”. This is not poverty. This is the complete disappearance of kunya, the shame that once defined the Fulani and Hausa man.
Meanwhile, in the cities, our daughters are caught in another kind of decay. In Kannywood, the Hausa film industry, actresses are routinely banned for what would once have been unthinkable behavior. In January 2025, the Kano State Film Censorship Board banned singer Usman Sojaboy and actresses Shamsiyya Muhammad and Hasina Suzan after a viral video showed them engaging in what the board called “immoral acts that contravene Kano‘s religious and cultural values”. Earlier, actress Rahma Sadau was banned for the offense of “hugging and cuddling” a pop star in a music video, an act that in the traditional North would have brought the deepest shame upon her entire family. Actresses have had nude videos leaked; sex tapes have circulated; and the industry, once a modest expression of Hausa culture, has become a battleground between immorality and the few remaining voices of restraint. In the traditional system, such women would have been reintegrated through marriage and community. Today, they are celebrated for their “freedom.”
And what of our children, the innocent ones? In Kano State, the commercial and cultural heart of the North, UNICEF has revealed that 51.9 per cent of children are stunted due to chronic malnutrition. Over 10 per cent are wasted, too thin for their height, often facing death if not treated promptly. MSF runs five centers in Kano, and between January and August 2025 alone, they treated over 26,000 malnourished children in outpatient care and admitted 5,533 for intensive treatment. Let that sink in. In the city of the richest elites, where politicians build palaces and emirs ride in convoys, children are dying of hunger. This is the harvest we have reaped.
Yet the elite themselves are not untouched by the decay. An orphaned child is one who lacks parental care. But today, the North has become an orphaned parent, abandoned by its own children, the elite who feast on the region‘s goodwill at the expense of the common man. From Zaria to Sokoto, aging parents lament how affluence turned their children into emotional orphans. “We fed them silver,” said a retired civil servant, “but they spat gold at us.” His sons no longer consult; his daughters no longer care. A nation is only as disciplined as its households, and where the home is ruled by indulgence, the country becomes a playground for immaturity.
How different it was. The traditional Arewa family system was built on tarbiyya, the complete shaping of character, values, discipline, and sense of responsibility from childhood into adulthood. Tarbiyya was not merely about teaching a child how to pray or greet elders. It was about nurturing them to understand honesty, empathy, accountability, respect, and service to others. Submission, modesty, sacrifice and responsibility were instilled in girls at an early age. The extended family was a safety net. Shame protected the community. Hospitality was a duty, not a choice. Alms were given quietly, not for social media applause. Education, both Islamic and traditional, was revered. The Almajiri system, in its original form, was designed to impart Islamic knowledge and discipline, not to expose children to hardship or street begging. It was a noble pursuit of sacred knowledge. And primitive capital accumulation, the hoarding of wealth while others starve, was condemned as a spiritual sickness.
What went wrong? The roots of our crisis are deep and painful to acknowledge. First, the elite conspiracy. The political class in northern Nigeria has not deemed it fit to have a convergence of practicable ideas to get the region out of the precipice. In spite of the urgency of the challenges, their mindset is solely fixated on grabbing power. They provide illicit drugs to youths to keep them perpetually subservient as political thugs. Second, the collapse of the Almajiri system into a factory of decay. Once a revered educational tradition, the system is now associated with street begging, child neglect, disease vulnerability, and radicalization risks. There are about 13 million Almajiri children roaming the streets of northern Nigeria, abandoned by their parents, exploited by their mallams, and ripe for recruitment by bandits and extremists. Third, the betrayal of religious leadership. The Ulama have become praise-singers for thieves and politicians. There is no single moral authority respected today in the North without money. Even the Sultan of Sokoto has expressed concern over the erosion of family discipline due to corruption, illicit wealth, and unregulated technology, warning that social media and online content are undermining traditional moral values. But his voice, like all others, is drowned out by the cacophony of greed.
The picture is grim. Over two million Nigerians, mostly of northern extraction, died due to unhinged insecurity between 2015 and 2024. An additional 2,235,954 were kidnapped, and a total of N2.2 billion was paid in ransom. The bandits who kidnap for ransom are the same boys who were once Almajiri, the same youths who were given drugs by politicians, the same men who grew up without tarbiyya. They have no shame because no one taught them shame. They have no respect because no one modeled respect. They kill because their souls are empty.
What is to be done? The solutions are painful because they begin not with government, not with the military, not with foreign aid, but with each and every one of us. The first solution is to restore tarbiyya in our homes. This is not the government‘s job to fix. Tarbiyya is the work of parents and guardians. We must stop outsourcing the raising of our sons to the streets and our daughters to social media. The Arab philosopher Ibn Miskawayh wrote in “The Refinement of Character” that the soul becomes habituated to virtue through repeated acts of goodness, and to vice through repeated acts of evil. Our children are habituated to evil because we have given them screens instead of time, money instead of presence, and freedom instead of discipline. Al-Ghazali, the great theologian, warned that a child is a trust in the hands of his parents, and his heart is a pure pearl. If he is taught goodness, he grows up in it and prospers. If he is neglected, he perishes. We have neglected our trust.
The second solution is to end the Almajiri begging system immediately. The traditional model was about learning, not begging. We must criminalize the transport of underage children from rural communities to urban centers without adequate arrangements for their welfare, education, and shelter. Every child in the North deserves a home, a meal, and an education that combines Islamic values with modern skills. No exceptions.
The third solution is to withdraw respect from the corrupt. In the traditional system, shame was a weapon. Today, we give convicted thieves heroes‘ welcomes. We give money to bandits in exchange for safety. We give titles to politicians who steal. This must stop. The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) said, “If you see a wrongdoing, change it with your hand. If you cannot, change it with your tongue. If you cannot, hate it in your heart, and that is the weakest of faith.” We have abandoned even the hating in our hearts.
The fourth solution is to restore the extended family‘s role. In the traditional system, every adult in the community was responsible for every child. Today, we mind our own business while other people’s children become bandits. We must reclaim that collective responsibility.
Finally, we must hold our religious leaders accountable. A scholar who praises a thief is no scholar. A Sufi who takes money from a politician and remains silent about corruption is no Sufi. The great jurist Ibn Taymiyyah wrote that silence in the face of oppression is the support of the oppressor. Our Ulama have supported the oppressors through their silence, and now they have no moral authority left.
If we do none of these things, let us stop complaining. Let us stop blaming poverty. Let us stop pretending that banditry is a mystery, that insecurity is a puzzle, that the decay of our society is someone else’s fault. The enemy is not outside. The enemy is in our homes, in our parenting, in our greed, in our silence, and in our shameful abandonment of the values that made the North great.
The North was once a civilization of scholarship, hospitality, honor, and faith. Today, we are becoming a wasteland of bandits, beggars, and betrayers. The choice is ours. We can continue as we are, with our children starving while our elites feast, with our daughters exposed while our clerics look away, with our sons killing while our politicians profit. Or we can fix this. But the first step is to look in the mirror and admit that we are the cause of our own tragedy. Until we do that, until we fix the family, fix tarbiyya, fix shame, fix accountability, there will never be peace in the North. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
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