At 6:42am in a dusty settlement on the outskirts of Zurmi in Zamfara State, a skinny 13-year-old boy named Mubarak ties his younger brother’s slippers with frayed rubber. His eyes dart nervously at the sound of a distant motorcycle. He pauses, listening. It is the same sound that has haunted him since bandits stormed his village one August night and dragged away his two older brothers, 15-year-old Isyaku and 17-year-old Hassan. Neither has returned.
“My mother still sets plates for them,” he whispers. “She says maybe they will come back one day.”
It is a fragile hope. In Zamfara’s forested bandit corridors, boys rarely return. They vanish into the armed groups that roam the mountains, swallowed by a conflict that feeds almost exclusively on young male bodies.
Across the northern region, from Katsina’s battlefront villages to Borno’s insurgency-scarred towns, from Kaduna’s violent outskirts to Kano’s drug-ridden suburbs, the male child is sliding into a crisis that most policy makers barely acknowledge.
The country talks loudly— and rightly—about protecting the girl-child. But beneath that conversation lies a quieter, more uncomfortable truth: the northern male child is dying, disappearing, addicted, recruited, radicalised, haunted, and emotionally abandoned at rates that threaten the region’s future.
This is the story of boys who are not growing into men— because many never get the chance.
In Kankara, Katsina State, a 15-year-old boy named Surajo sits on a bench outside a temporary shelter for displaced families. He used to graze cattle with his father until one afternoon when gunmen stormed their grazing route near Tsambe Forest. He remembered running— barefoot, breathless, stumbling through thorn bushes—as bullets cracked behind him.
His father did not make it out. For several months, he lived in fear, wandering between relatives’ homes, often sleeping in unfinished buildings.
“There is no man in the house anymore,” he says, staring at his dusty palms. “I am the first son now. But I am small.”
Surajo’s story echoes through hundreds of villages across the North-West. In community after community, adolescent boys are now both primary targets and primary recruits for the region’s spiraling violence. When bandits raid a village, they abduct women for ransom—but they often seize boys for war.
In some villages in Zurmi, Shinkafi, Faskari, and Batsari, entire age brackets of teenage boys have thinned out. Some are in the forest. Some are dead. Some have fled to cities as child labourers or drug-runners. Some simply drift.
“People talk about extinction of wildlife,” an elder in Tsafe told me. “But the real extinction is our sons.”
BORNO: ALTERED LIVES
In Borno, the situation carries a different but equally devastating weight. On the outskirts of Maiduguri, in a rehabilitation centre for children rescued from insurgent groups, 14-year-old “Mustapha”—not his real name—sits quietly in a counselling room, tapping a plastic bottle against his knee.
He was nine when Boko Haram fighters stormed his village. His father was killed. His mother fled in the chaos. The fighters took him and other boys into the forest. There, he learned how to carry weapons before he learned how to write his own name.
“I did not know I was a child,” he says softly. “They told us we were men.”
He remembers being given drugs to stay awake, witnessing beheadings, and being forced to chant war songs for hours. His entire childhood blurred into a haze of commands, beatings, and indoctrination.
Yet, when he was finally rescued after a joint military operation, the society he returned to viewed him with suspicion. Some neighbours told his relatives, “He’s Boko Haram’s child now.”
“We saved his body,” a social worker says, “but we are still trying to save his soul.”
For thousands of boys in the North-East, war has replaced fatherhood, schooling, and identity. They are children only in age; in trauma, they are 100 years old.
Kaduna State offers a disturbing intersection of insecurity, drug abuse, and social breakdown. In communities around Birnin Gwari, rural boys are caught between bandits in the forests and drugs in the towns. Many drift into Kaduna metropolis where they join gangs, thugs-for-hire, political foot soldiers, or street militias known locally as “sara-suka”.
At a rehabilitation home in Rigasa, a 16-year-old boy named Faruk lies on a thin mattress. His limbs tremble slightly— withdrawal from codeine and tramadol. He spent three years as a gang runner, delivering drugs to older boys and occasionally acting as a lookout during violent clashes.
His mother sits beside him, wringing her hands. “I lost him when he was 12,” she says. “He left home for five days. Next week, he left for one month. Then he stopped going to school. I used to have a son. I now have a stranger.”
In Kaduna, police officers confide privately that their juvenile cells hold more boys than they can manage—boys arrested for petty theft, drugs, violence, gang initiation crimes. The youngest among them is sometimes 10 or 11.
“It’s a generation of boys being raised by the streets,” one officer says, shaking his head.
In Kano, the challenge takes yet another form: a deepening narcotic epidemic among young boys—some as young as seven.
At a slum near Kofar Nasarawa, in a cluster of zinc shanties, boys gather around a shallow gutter inhaling fumes from rubber solutions, burnt plastic, and petrol. A few older boys sip codeine-laced drinks from reused bottles.
One of them, 14-year-old Ibrahim, grins as he explains how he started at age nine when an older neighbour introduced him to “sholisho,” an inhalant mixture. “It makes you forget hunger,” he says. “It makes you bold.”
Boldness is what drives many boys into crime, into cult groups, into mob violence. On chaotic nights, some of these same boys are recruited as street enforcers by political actors.
In Mariri, a drug counsellor estimates that four in ten male teenagers have experimented with codeine, tramadol, or inhalants. “It’s not even hidden anymore,” he says. “Our boys are drowning in drugs while the country is watching.”
THE ALMAJIRIS
Across the entire North, the most visible symbol of the male-child crisis is the Almajiri system, a centuries-old structure that once provided religious education but has now collapsed into a humanitarian emergency.
In Kano, Katsina, Bauchi, Gombe, Kebbi, Niger, Jigawa, and Sokoto, tens of thousands of boys roam the streets barefoot, bowls in hand—hungry, unsupervised, invisible. Some sleep in abandoned buildings. Some pile six or seven to a room.
Some join urban gangs. Some get drawn into petty crime. Some are trafficked to other states as domestic labourers or farmhands.
Many become easy prey for criminal networks looking for cheap labour or courier services. Others are recruited by extremist preachers or radical sects.
“They are boys with no fathers and no future,” a child rights activist in Kano says. “Society has handed them to fate.”
But it is not fate alone that fails them—it is policy. Despite repeated promises from politicians, the Almajiri system remains unreformed, unregulated, and exploited.
While Nigeria often celebrates the success of girl-child campaigns—scholarships, anti-marriage advocacy, safe-space programmes—few people ask what is happening to the boys left behind in the same communities.
A sociologist in Kaduna explains: “You can walk into many rural primary schools in the North and see more girls than boys. It was not like this before. The boys have left—into farms, into forests, into drugs, into informal labour. We are witnessing a silent demographic collapse.”
In parts of Zamfara, Katsina, and Kaduna, some villages report that 60–70% of boys aged 12–17 have dropped out of school—either due to insecurity or economic pressure.
In Borno, thousands of boys are classified as “formerly associated with armed groups.”
In Kano, NDLEA reports show male teenagers make up the majority of arrests in drug cases.
No one has compiled these data into a single narrative. But when placed together, they reveal a stark truth: Northern Nigeria is raising a generation of boys who may never become functional adults.
A LOSING GAME
In many northern communities, the boy-child is quietly disappearing—claimed not by a single threat but by a convergence of crises that strip young males of safety, identity, and a future. Conflict remains the most visible of these dangers. Banditry, insurgency, vigilante reprisals, and even state security operations have turned boys into frontline casualties. In many attacks across the North-West, homes are raided and teenage boys are deliberately targeted—killed, abducted, or used as human shields.
But beyond the violence, another force is swallowing them: recruitment. Armed groups—from insurgent cells to rural bandit gangs—actively seek out boys because they are impressionable, physically strong, and easily manipulated. Some join out of fear, others out of desperation, and many because no alternatives exist. Once inside, the line between victim and perpetrator blurs, and escape becomes almost impossible.
Drugs have become another silent killer. Codeine, tramadol, rubber solution, and increasingly crystal meth (ice) are numbing a generation whose brains are still forming. These substances offer temporary escape from trauma and poverty but leave long-term damage— mental illness, violence, addiction, and in some cases, early death. In many communities, teenage boys gather behind kiosks or abandoned buildings, inhaling or swallowing substances that slowly reshape their identities and futures.
For thousands of others, the street is their only home. The Almajiri system—once rooted in religious scholarship—has devolved into a pipeline of unsupervised boys navigating life without parental protection, structure, or guidance. Many grow up without any sense of belonging, drifting into crime, drugs, or exploitation simply to survive.
School dropout rates among boys continue to rise. Some flee insecurity; others are pushed out by poverty and the pressure to earn income. Once they leave school, it becomes a steep, slippery descent—into menial labour, motor park hustling, street gangs, or informal settlements where they become prey to recruiters for crime and insurgency.
Underlying all of these issues is a poverty trap that tightens around boys early. With limited opportunities, they turn to whatever survival strategy presents itself—even if it’s dangerous.
Casual labour, local vigilantism, drug running, smuggling, or escorting herders through unsafe routes become normalised pathways for adolescent boys.
Even those who escape the violence carry invisible scars. Former child soldiers or abducted boys who return home often face deep stigma. Instead of being rehabilitated, they are treated with suspicion—ostracised as “killers” or “terrorists.”
Many end up returning to the very groups they fled because home becomes another battlefield.
Politics, too, exploits their vulnerability. Underage boys are mobilised as political thugs, armed with drugs, knives, or Dane guns, used to intimidate voters and disrupt elections.
After the ballots are counted, they are discarded—left with criminal records, injuries, or newfound addictions.
Across the region, these forces converge to create a silent emergency: boys who should be preparing for adulthood are being consumed before they even understand what adulthood means. The disappearance of the boy-child is not just a social crisis—it is shaping the future workforce, the future family structure, and the future stability of northern Nigeria itself.
Without urgent intervention, an entire generation of men will be lost before they ever become men.
WHERE DO BOYS GO?
In Kaduna’s Angwan Dosa, a widow named Halima sits outside her one-room home holding a photograph of her son, Bashir. He was 15 when he disappeared from home two years ago.
“He told me he was going to look for work,” she recalls. “I thought maybe he would wash plates in a restaurant or carry loads in the market.”
Two weeks later, someone told her Bashir had been seen in a Sara-suka den. Another person claimed he had joined a group of boys working for a drug dealer. A third said he had travelled with a political godfather’s boys during an election campaign. No one knows for sure.
“When a girl goes missing,” Halima said, “people search for her. They cry. They announce. But when a boy goes missing, they say he has followed bad friends. They say he is stubborn. They say he is a man. But he is a child.” Her words linger like smoke in the air.
Sociologists warn that the North is facing a future where millions of young men would be emotionally stunted, traumatised, poorly educated, addicted, or radicalised.
These men will enter adulthood without the ability to build families, maintain steady work, or participate constructively in society.
“You cannot build a nation on broken boys,” a psychologist in Maiduguri says. “They will grow into broken men.”
Already, community elders lament the decline of moral authority. Traditional apprenticeship systems are collapsing. Farming is unsafe. Cattle rearing is threatened by rustling. Businesses are shrinking. Marriage age is rising. Divorce rates are increasing. Male migration is growing. Female-headed households are expanding.
And at the heart of it: The northern male child is disappearing.