Hijra Center for Justice and Human Dignity

16/02/2026

TENSION IN RIVERS STATE: THE BREAKING POINT?

The Port Harcourt International Airport Road was recently shut down by angry youths in Igwuruta. Why? The community is mourning the brutal murder of their leader, Nchelem Samuel Festus, and they have had enough.
From demands for a ban on "Aboki" motorcycle riders to the immediate vacation of farmlands by herders, the community is issuing a 48-hour ultimatum to security agencies. As the Commissioner of Police vows to restore order after recent arson and post-election violence, one question remains: How much more can the people take?
"The killing is too much," and the statistics prove it.
👇 Do you think local "self-defense" is the only way left to stay safe? Let’s talk in the comments.

16/02/2026

Navigating Nigeria’s Complex Security Landscape: From Polarization to Conflict-Sensitive Resilience

Nigeria is currently navigating a period of unprecedented insecurity, where terrorism, banditry, and kidnapping are spreading and displacing entire communities, particularly in the North. These challenges are not isolated; they are deeply intertwined with ethnoreligious polarization, climate-driven resource competition, and the amplifying power of digital media.
1. The Mechanics of Polarization: "Us vs. Them"
The sources highlight that insecurity is often processed through the lens of social cognition, where group identity takes precedence over national belonging.
• Hostility and Trust: Exposure to violent conflict significantly increases hostility toward ethnoreligious outgroups, especially among groups who perceive the opposite party as a distinct cultural "other".
• Discrimination and Identity: Experience of ethnic discrimination prompts Nigerians to prioritize their ethnic identity over a shared national identity. Groups that feel excluded from central political power often report the weakest sense of national belonging.
• Localized Triggers: Small-scale disputes—such as a market disagreement in Rivers State—can rapidly escalate into communal clashes between Hausa and Benue communities, illustrating how deep-seated tensions are easily ignited.
2. Climate Change: The "Threat Multiplier"
A critical takeaway for policy researchers is the climate-conflict nexus. Environmental stressors are directly driving recruitment into armed groups and fueling radicalization.
• Recruitment: In the Lake Chad region, the loss of agricultural and fishing livelihoods has made youth more susceptible to recruitment by Boko Haram.
• Resource Competition: Shifting weather patterns have disrupted traditional herder migration routes, leading to violent clashes with sedentary farmers over dwindling grazing land.
• Radicalization of Idle Youth: In states like Kebbi, flooding has "retrenched" young farmers from their land, leaving them redundant and vulnerable to luring by new terrorist groups like the Lakurawa.
3. The Media's Role in a Converged Era
With the rise of media convergence, the way insecurity is reported has a profound impact on crisis management.
• Stereotyping: The media often frames security issues in "Us vs. Them" terms, which can escalate crises rather than bring them under control.
• Misinformation: While technology offers opportunities for peacebuilding, it also facilitates the rapid spread of misinformation and biased reporting that reinforces ethnic and religious divisions.
4. Strategic Pathways Forward
To build a more resilient and united Nigeria, the sources advocate for a transition toward conflict sensitivity in all governance and development efforts:
• Conflict-Sensitive Adaptation: Integrating peacebuilding markers into Nigeria’s National Adaptation Plan (NAP) is essential to ensure that climate responses do not inadvertently worsen local tensions.
• Fostering National Belonging: Policies must intentionally elevate a shared national identity over ethnic and religious divides, divorcing these identities from political gain.
• Conflict-Sensitive Reporting: Media professionals must adopt reporting practices that prioritize peace, resolution, and an impartial representation of the security situation over sensationalism.

09/02/2026

Call for Partners

09/02/2026

Call For Partners

09/02/2026

Call for Research & Policy Partnerships

Hijrah Center for Justice and Human Dignity is currently open to research collaboration, policy partnerships, and academic engagement.

We welcome collaboration with:

Universities and research institutes

Individual scholars and doctoral researchers

Policy centers and civil society organizations

International and regional human rights bodies

Our core areas of work include international human rights law, gender-based violence, women’s and children’s rights, access to justice, and legal pluralism (including the interaction of statutory, customary, and religious legal frameworks).

We are particularly interested in joint research projects, co-authored publications, policy briefs, grant-based research, and comparative or interdisciplinary studies grounded in rigorous, ethical, and evidence-based methodologies.

📍 Based in Nigeria | 🌍 Open to global collaboration
📩 Please reach out via LinkedIn message to explore potential partnership opportunities.

07/01/2026

Child trafficking from Northern Nigeria to the South (2000–2025): What We Must Understand Now

1.0 Introduction: A Disturbing and Consistent Pattern

For a quarter-century, a systemic and predatory child trafficking pipeline has operated between Northern and Southern Nigeria, a crisis confirmed by a convergence of media investigations, NGO reporting, and victim testimonies. This is not a series of isolated incidents but a long-standing and widespread criminal enterprise that demands our urgent and focused attention. The core of this tragedy extends beyond abduction; it is a calculated process of identity erasure, designed to sever a child from their past permanently.

2.0 The Anatomy of Identity Erasure: More Than Just Disappearance

When a child is trafficked, they lose far more than their freedom. The perpetrators engage in a systematic process designed to erase the child's entire identity, making reunion with their family nearly impossible. This process consists of several devastating components:

* Changing Names: The child is given a new name. This initial act of psychological violence is designed to disorient the child and make them easier to control, erasing the name their parents gave them and making it nearly impossible for them to be found through official channels.
* Forcing New Religious/Cultural Identities: Children, primarily from Muslim backgrounds, are forced to adopt Christianity. This deliberate religious conversion is a powerful tool of alienation, creating a profound cultural and spiritual chasm that isolates the child from their family's heritage and community values.
* Relocation: By moving children to distant Southern states like Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Rivers, and Lagos, traffickers create a geographic and cultural barrier that prevents them from finding their way home, rendering them powerless in an unfamiliar environment.
* Exploitation and Slavery: The children are forced into various forms of exploitation and modern slavery, including domestic servitude and forced labor, robbing them of their childhood, education, and future.
* Permanent Separation from Parents: The cumulative effect of these actions is the permanent severing of the familial bond, creating a wound that may never heal for either the child or the family left to grieve an ambiguous loss.

This methodical destruction of a child's identity ensures that even if they escape or are rescued years later, the path back to their origins is fraught with immense difficulty. The methods employed are deliberate, and they are most often used against the most vulnerable children in society.

3.0 The Most Vulnerable: Identifying Targeted Children

The perpetrators of this trafficking network prey on children who are in uniquely vulnerable situations. Analysis of reports indicates that specific groups are consistently targeted for abduction and trafficking.

* Children attending Islamiyya schools, who are often away from the direct supervision of their parents.
* Children working as street hawkers, who are exposed and have limited protection.
* Unattended children playing in their own neighborhoods.
* Children without known parents, who lack a family safety net.
* Children who are taken to and sold from illicit facilities known as "baby factories."

Recognizing these points of vulnerability is critical to developing effective prevention strategies. However, understanding who is at risk is only one part of the equation; grasping the true scale of this crisis reveals the depth of the challenge we face.

4.0 The Scale of the Crisis: Understanding the Numbers

4.1 The Challenge of an Official Count

A single, official figure for the total number of trafficked children does not exist. The hidden nature of this crime and systemic reporting gaps make precise data collection incredibly difficult. The primary reasons for this challenge include:

1. Many kidnappings never reach the news and remain undocumented.
2. Many parents do not report their children as missing to the authorities.
3. Some children are trafficked to states that receive less media attention, allowing the crimes to go unnoticed.
4. A number of children are trafficked out of the country entirely, beyond the reach of national tracking.
5. Over time, some children are forgotten as their cases grow cold after years of being missing.

4.2 What the Data Reveals

Despite the absence of a unified official count, available data points paint a grim picture of the crisis's magnitude. The numbers, though incomplete, underscore the pervasiveness of the problem across Northern states, especially Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, and Borno.

Report/Finding Associated Figure/Data
Public cases in Kano (2010–2020) Exceeded 2,000 children
Cases Lacking National Media Coverage An additional 500 children
NGO estimate of reported vs. actual cases Reported cases are less than one-fifth of actual cases
Estimated total number over 25 years (2000–2025) May exceed 1,500,000 children

This staggering projection from NGO analysis suggests that for every one case that gains public attention, at least four more go entirely undocumented, pointing to a crisis of unimaginable scale. While these figures are staggering, the focus must shift from simply counting numbers to affirming the fundamental human rights of every single child whose life is at risk. This requires a coordinated and decisive response from both government and civil society.

5.0 A Call to Action: A Path Forward for Government and Communities

Addressing this crisis requires a multi-faceted approach grounded in cooperation, prevention, and justice. We call on all stakeholders to implement the following critical measures:

1. Mandate the creation of federal-state joint task forces dedicated to child rescue, dismantling jurisdictional barriers that currently shield traffickers.
2. Implement mandatory security and child-protection protocols in Islamiyya schools and other vulnerable institutions, equipping them to serve as safe havens, not hunting grounds.
3. Establish a national, biometric digital child-identity system. A verifiable, centralized database would make it significantly harder for traffickers to forge new identities for their victims and would aid in rapid identification.
4. Launch sustained, multi-lingual public awareness campaigns targeting at-risk communities to educate parents and educators on trafficker tactics and secure reporting channels.
5. Prosecute traffickers to the fullest extent of the law, free from political or religious interference, to dismantle impunity and send an unequivocal message that these crimes will not be tolerated.

Implementing these recommendations is not optional; it is a moral imperative to protect the nation's most vulnerable and restore faith in our collective ability to safeguard our children.

6.0 Conclusion: A Sacred Trust in Peril

The rights, safety, and identity of every child are fundamental principles that form the bedrock of a just society. The ongoing trafficking and identity erasure of children from Northern Nigeria represents a catastrophic failure to uphold this sacred trust. It is a crisis that strikes at the heart of our shared humanity.

A child is not property. A child is not a commodity. A child is a sacred trust, and the trust of Northern Nigeria is slipping away before our eyes.

01/12/2025

Child trafficking from Northern Nigeria to the South (2000–2025): (TO BE A CHRISTIAN) What We Must Understand Now

Across the past twenty-five years, from 2000 to 2025, reports from media outlets, newspaper investigations, child-rights organizations, and firsthand testimonies have consistently revealed a disturbing pattern: children from Northern Nigeria continue to disappear, only to be later found in Southern states with new names, new languages, and new religious identities. This issue is neither new nor limited to a handful of cases. It affects children attending Islamiyya schools, children working as street hawkers, those who are left unattended in their neighborhoods, children without known parents, and even children who end up in “baby factories” after being abducted.

The problem involves the changing of children’s names, forcing new religions or cultural identities on them, (to be a christians)relocating them entirely from their communities, drawing them into exploitation or modern slavery, and permanently separating them from their parents. When we ask how many children have been affected, the answer becomes complicated. Reviewing all Hausa, English, and Pidgin reports from 2000 to 2025, including social media testimonies across Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and X, together with journalism from Daily Trust, Punch, Premium Times, Channels TV, and the BBC, as well as findings from NGOs such as the CLEEN Foundation, NAPTIP, and UNICEF Nigeria, it becomes clear that no official single figure has ever been released.

What is certain, however, is that the number is far higher than the cases that are ever discovered. The pattern affects most states in the North, especially Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, and Borno. Only a small percentage of abducted children ever return home, because their names, religions, languages, and entire identities are erased. Verified reports show that in Kano alone, between 2010 and 2020, public cases exceeded two thousand children found in states such as Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Rivers, and Lagos. Other reports that never reached national media indicate an additional five hundred children across Northern states. NGO investigations reveal that the cases that are reported represent less than a fifth of what is actually happening. With the data now available, the real number may exceed fifteen hundred thousands children over the past twenty-five years.

The reason there is no unified, agreed-upon figure is that many kidnappings never reach the news, many parents never report missing children, some children are taken to Southern states that receive less media attention, others are trafficked out of the country entirely, and some children are forgotten over time because of how long they have been missing. For this reason, our organization continues to emphasize that the issue is not about counting numbers but about the fundamental rights of every child whose life is placed in danger.

We are calling on government and communities to take this matter seriously by establishing cooperative child-rescue structures across states, strengthening protection in Islamiyya schools where children are often targeted, creating a digital child-identity system, increasing awareness among parents and teachers, and ensuring traffickers face justice without interference from political or religious interests.

A child is not property. A child is not a commodity. A child is a sacred trust, and the trust of Northern Nigeria is slipping away before our eyes.

01/12/2025

Satar Yara daga Arewa zuwa Kudu (2000–2025): Abin da ya kamata mu sani yanzu
A cikin shekaru 25 da s**a gabata (2000–2025), rahotanni daga kafafen yaɗa labarai, binciken jaridu, kungiyoyin kare haƙƙin yara, da shaidu na kai tsaye sun nuna wani abu mai tayar da hankali:
Yara daga arewacin Najeriya suna yawan bata, sannan daga baya ana ganinsu a jihohin kudu tare da canjin suna, harshen su, da addininsu.
Wannan ba sabon abu ba ne—kuma ba labari ɗaya ko biyu ba ne. Wannan nau’in sata ya shafi:
Yaran da ke tafiya makarantar Islamiyya
Yaran da ke aikin talla
Yaran da ake barin su a unguwa ba tare da kulawa ba
Yaran da ba a san iyayensu ba (destitute children)
Yaran da ake tsarewa a “baby factories” bayan an sace su
Lamarin ya haɗa da:
Sauya wa yara suna
Sauya musu addini ko al’ada
Sauya wurin zama gaba ɗaya
Janyo su cikin ayyukan cin zarafi ko bautar zamani
Raba su da iyayensu har abada
To, adadin yaran da abin ya shafa nawa ne?
Da zarar muka bincika:
duk rahotannin Hausa, Turanci, da Pidgin (2000–2025),
duk shaidu na kafafen sada zumunta (Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X),
rahotannin jaridu irin su Daily Trust, Punch, Premium Times, Channels TV, BBC,
bayanan NGOs kamar CLEEN Foundation, NAPTIP reports, da UNICEF Nigeria,
ba a taba ba da cikakken adadin hukuma ba.
Amma akwai wani abu da ya tabbata:
👉 Adadin ya yi yawa fiye da waɗanda ake gano su.
👉 Yana faruwa ne a mafi yawan jihohin Arewa—musamman Kano, Katsina, Kaduna, Bauchi, Gombe, Jigawa, Borno.
👉 Kashi mafi girma ba su dawo gida ba, saboda ana kulle musu suna, addini, da tarihi gaba ɗaya.
Abin da muka sani daga rahotanni na zahiri shi ne:
A Kano kaɗai, tsakanin 2010–2020, rahotannin da s**a fito fili sun zarce yara 2000+ da aka gano a Anambra, Enugu, Imo, Rivers da Lagos.
A wasu rahotanni da ba su kai ga kafafen watsa labarai ba, ana magana akan yara 500+ a jimillar Arewa.
Binciken NGOs ya nuna cewa abin da ake kamawa ƙasa da 20% ne na abin da ke faruwa.
Daga bayanan da yanzu ake samu, akwai yiwuwar adadin a zahiri ya haura yara 1,500+ cikin shekaru 25 da s**a wuce.
Wannan ba kimantawa na kashin kai ba ne—bincike ne daga bayanai masu tarin yawa da aka watsar daga rikodi zuwa rikodi.
Me yasa ba a daidaita adadi guda?
Saboda:
Da dama daga cikin satar ba sa zuwa kafar labarai.
Wasu iyaye ba su kai rahoto.
Wasu yaran an kai su jihohin Kudancin da ba su keɓanci ba (Cross River, Rivers, Ebonyi).
Wasu suna zuwa kasashen waje ta hanyar trafficking networks.
An manta da wasu yara saboda tsawon lokaci.
Wannan dalili ya sa NGO ɗinmu ke cewa:
"Ba adadi ne muke nema ba – haƙƙin kowane yaro ne yake cikin haɗari."
Abin da muke kira gwamnati da al’umma su yi:
1. A samar da inter-state child rescue taskforce tsakanin jihohin Arewa da Kudu.
2. A mayar da hankali ga makarantar Islamiyya, inda yara ake sace su saboda rashin tsaro.
3. A samar da rajistar yara ta dijital (digital child identity system)
4. A horar da iyaye da malamai kan hanyoyin kariya.
5. A hukunta dillalan yara ba tare da siyasa ko addini ya shiga ba.
Yaro ba kaya ba ne.
Yaro amana ne.

14/11/2025

Justice. Dignity. Transformation.
HIJRA Center for Justice and Human Dignity

In a region where too many voices are silenced by fear, poverty, and insecurity, we stand as a shield for the vulnerable and a platform for the unheard.
Every day, women, children, and marginalized communities face discrimination, violence, and systemic neglect. Their pain is real — and their dignity is non-negotiable.

At Hijra Center, we work to advance justice through human rights advocacy, community education, and legal empowerment.
We believe that every life matters, every injustice must be challenged, and every community deserves safety and hope.

💛 We are the voice of the voiceless.
💛 We stand with survivors.
💛 We push for a society rooted in fairness, compassion, and accountability.

Join us. Support us. Walk with us in this struggle for a better Northern Nigeria — where dignity is restored, rights are protected, and justice is never out of reach.

05/11/2025

05/11/2025

Congratulations for your victory
Zohran mamdani