A non-profit organisation, Foundation for Peace Professional (PeacePro), yesterday, said Nigeria’s worsening insecurity would remain a ticking time bomb unless the Almajiri system is dismantled within the next five years, declaring that decades of child abandonment, disguised as culture and religion, were fuelling banditry, terrorism and organised crime.
 
 PeacePro issued the warning after a fact-finding tour of seven northern states, describing the Almajiri system as a factory of insecurity whose consequences now threaten to spill beyond Nigeria and destabilise the entire West Africa sub-region.
  
Executive Director of the group, Abdulrazaq Hamzat, said what the country faces is far more dangerous than isolated criminality. PeacePro called on the federal and state governments to declare the Almajiri crisis a national emergency and security priority, urging a coordinated action to dismantle the system within five years through rehabilitation, vocational training and firm engagement with religious and traditional leaders.
  
“This is not just banditry or terrorism. It is the long-term consequence of a society that has normalised the abandonment of its children,”Hamzat said, adding: “The Almajiri system, as practised today, is not a policy error. It is evidence of total societal collapse.”
  
He accused families, religious institutions, ethnic leadership, society and the state of collective failure, insisting that all five have simultaneously abdicated responsibility.

“It is a failure of culture, family, religion, government and society rolled into one,” he added. PeacePro warned that Nigeria is mass-producing millions of excluded, uneducated and desperate children yearly, describing the situation as a looming regional catastrophe.

Based on its findings, the group said the crisis stems from five interconnected failures: parents dumping responsibility without safeguards; ethnic and communal structures defending tragedy as tradition; religious learning systems accepting children without welfare or protection; a society that has normalised begging; and a state that routinely ignores child rights and basic education laws.
  
“When all these fail at once, insecurity becomes inevitable,” Hamzat stressed. PeacePro cautioned that children raised without education, family care or civic identity grow into adults disconnected from the state and easily recruited by criminal gangs, extremist movements and violent political networks.
  
The organisation stressed that its stance is not an attack on Islam or northern culture but a call for urgent reform grounded in responsibility and compassion.