About three in 10 almajiri children in Nigeria are girls, but the world has hardly paid attention to how the controversial system of Islamic education affects them. In 2012, when she was only seven, Maymunah* left her home in Dandinshe, a small community in Kofar Ruwa, Kano State, for Makafin Dala. The only reason her …
Read more “The Almajiri Girl’s Long Distance Race To Relevance”
There are 33 million active monthly users of Facebook in Nigeria. There are also many millions of people exchanging information on Twitter, 280 characters at a time. But just like the country’s population of phone subscribers cannot be determined using only the number of SIM cards in circulation, it is also hard to say for sure because …
Read more “#EndSARS: The Trend And Threat Of Fake Social Media Accounts”
Insecurity has, for many years, occupied a central position among an array of dire problems Nigerians face. For people in the northeast, it manifests mainly as the Boko Haram insurgency. For those in other regions of the north and middle-belt, we have banditry, inter-communal conflicts, and clashes between herders and farming communities. In the south, …
Read more “Why Local Conflict-Reporting Lacks Depth And What Journalists Can Do Differently”
Thousands of women in Borno have had to raise their children alone because their husbands, arbitrarily accused of being members of Boko Haram, are jailed by the Nigerian Army. But they are not planning to give up hope. Hauwa has not heard from her husband in many years. In 2015, her town, Bama, Borno State, …
Read more “Knifar: Women Facing Forced Family Separation By Soldiers Cry Out”
Realising that the Nigeria Police cannot curb crime alone, vigilante groups in a southwest state have stuck to ancient practices of reducing insecurity and seem to be succeeding. When Olajide finally joined the Supreme Eiye Confraternity as a sophomore at the Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State, it was not because he wanted to stand out. He …
Read more “Insecurity Forcing Ogun Communities To Use Traditional Safeguards In Combatting Crime”
Young IDPs in Nigeria are sexually assaulted by officials as a condition to receive food and medical supplies. Young Aisha* has had more than her fair share of misfortunes. She was only six years old when the Boko Haram terror group levied war on the secular society in Nigeria. The ensuing carnage and bloodbath has taken the …
Read more “Sex For Survival: How Officials Use Underage IDP Girls As Objects Of Pleasure”
A Non-Governmental Organisation in Nigeria, the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), has regularly released figures since 2018, which it says are evidence of an ongoing genocide against Christians by jihadists and jihadist herdsmen in the country. But an analysis of statistics from reliable sources shows that these claims are inaccurate. …
Read more “An Assessment Of Claims On ‘Christian Genocide’ In Nigeria”
A Nigerian Twitter user, My Deen My Swag, has shared some misleading pictures to defend the death penalty for blasphemy in some states in Northern Nigeria where Sharia (Islamic canonical law) applies. “Whether they steal food or phone, they don’t deserve to be burnt to dead. They burn people even for stealing N50 to dead …
Read more “Misleading Photos Used To Justify Blasphemy Laws”
The Nigerian Army has occasionally made statements condemning the spread of misinformation which, it says, has the potential to undermine national security. It has more frequently debunked particular claims about its operations that are in circulation. But recent trends show that it might have extended its definition of “fake news” to include any information from …
Read more “How Nigerian Army Is Weaponising ‘Fake News’ To Discredit Journalists”
In many countries, the face of policing and fighting insecurity has changed dramatically in the past decades as a result of advancements in technology. Video surveillance through the use of closed-circuit television (CCTV) became more common in the 1970s with the invention of video cassette recording technology and this has helped in both preventing and …
Read more “How Innovative Phone Apps Are Helping To Fight Crime Across The World”