Abuja Almajiri School Where Toilets Outnumber Classrooms ― And They Aren’t Even Functional

Nigeria has always been famous for her huge population – the seventh largest in the world – and for her huge number of out-of-school children ― the largest in the world.  Therefore, former president Goodluck Jonathan established “Almajiri integrated model schools” in the North to reduce the number of children who are out of schools, but …

Is Landmass Powering Violence in Northern Nigeria? Here’s What the Data Says

Landmass may be contributing to the increasing ungoverned areas breeding terrorism and banditry across Nigeria’s northern states. The steady rise of violent extremism and its resulting conflicts has rendered Nigeria unsafe. In the past decade, the terrorist group Boko Haram, and its splinter organisations, ANSARU and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), have caused …

Fear of Boko Haram Not Enough to Protect Borno’s Forests From IDPs

Desperate, IDPs in Northeast Nigeria are plunging into the forests for their daily bread, despite the danger posed by lurking terrorists and the risks posed to the environment. Opposite Dalori II displacement camp, located at the outskirts of Maiduguri, Northeast Nigeria, is a mound of hay, nearly six feet tall and twice as wide. It had …

An Encroaching Desert Intensifies Nigeria’s Farmer-Herder Crisis

By Kunle Adebajo and Murtala AbdullahiPhotography by Kunle Adebajo and Murtala AbdullahiVisualizations by Yuxi Wang and Jillian Dudziak A bare-chested old man lies in the emergency room of a government hospital in northeast Nigeria. An intravenous line sticks out from his right arm and an arrow from his left shoulder. A second arrow, with the tip now detached from its shaft, rests on a …

How Civil Wars Start and Lessons for Today’s Nigeria

‘Civil wars ignite and escalate in ways that are predictable; they follow a script,’ writes author Barbara F. Walter. How close are developments in Nigeria to this time-tested script? For decades, social scientists have researched factors which, combined, best predict that a country will experience civil war. Nigeria ticks a lot of the boxes. Wars …