They only see the trouble

The afternoon heat in Kano had not even begun to relent after Zuhr prayers when the world I thought I knew tilted violently on its axis. I was visiting friends in the neighborhood where I once lived on Titin Dankura, Zoo Road—a place that held memories of quiet evenings and neighbourly banter. We had rounded […]

The afternoon heat in Kano had not even begun to relent after Zuhr prayers when the world I thought I knew tilted violently on its axis. I was visiting friends in the neighborhood where I once lived on Titin Dankura, Zoo Road—a place that held memories of quiet evenings and neighbourly banter. We had rounded a corner, walking back to where we had been sitting, when the atmosphere cracked open. People were running everywhere, screaming, their faces twisted with a fear I had only ever seen in movies. Then I saw them: one group of young men chasing another, a moving storm of machetes, clubs, and spears glinting in the harsh afternoon light.

In all the years I lived in Kano, I had only heard about the violent gang wars. That day, I witnessed one.

I remember catching a glimpse of one of the gang members running for his life, his legs pumping desperately before they tangled and he crashed to the ground. I remember thinking, that guy is a goner. I had never actually seen someone fighting for their lives before, but I saw it that day. They were really trying to kill him—landing strike after strike with clubs and machetes and anything they could wield. No one intervened. Everyone took to their heels. We took cover and watched from afar, helpless witnesses to a brutality that felt both surreal and terrifyingly real.

When the attackers finally broke off to chase down others, we rushed to the fallen young man. He was still alive, barely—bloodied, with fractures and gashes across his body, but conscious. In the distance, we saw the gang had caught up with another victim, and then another. By the time the dust settled, three casualties lay bleeding on the same street.

What happened next was almost as disturbing as the violence itself. Neighborhood people surrounded the first casualty, interrogating him aggressively. There was no sympathy in their words, only commands that he get up and leave. Their eyes held nothing but hate. The second casualty was unconscious and clearly dying. The police eventually came and evacuated all three. We later learned that one—the one who clearly wasn’t going to make it—didn’t even survive the trip to the hospital.

These were children. None of them looked older than twenty. They were kids—the same kids we see all over Kano, all over northern Nigeria. Unloved, unwanted, raised by the streets that would eventually consume them.

The discussions that followed the police departure were nasty. Neighbours tried to outdo each other in their cruelty: how unmoved they were, how they had no pity for the casualties, how they wished those kids had been finished off. Some even claimed they could have done the job themselves. Apparently, these were the young men who had terrorised the neighborhood—mugging people in dark alleys and on Adaidaita Sahu, dealing drugs, and in some cases, killing their victims while robbing them of their phones and valuables. There was no love lost for them.

And yet, as I listened to their voices harden into something unrecognisable, I was reminded of a line from one of Tupac Shakur’s most introspective songs, “Thugz Mansion,” released posthumously in 2002 . The acoustic version featuring Nas captures a vulnerability that mainstream hip-hop rarely exposed: “No one knows my struggle, they only see the trouble / not knowing it’s hard to carry on when no one loves you” .

Tupac understood something fundamental about young men who become monsters. Born into poverty, raised amid violence, and starved of love, he articulated what the street children of Kano live every day. Saul Williams, who performed in the Broadway musical featuring Tupac’s music, noted that in this song, Tupac “raises a real question which I feel is extremely sincere, which is: if you are exposed to great levels of violence and poverty, how can you really be expected to even know how to make informed choices?” .

The young men who fell bleeding on that Kano street did not choose their fate in any meaningful sense. It was chosen for them long before they could hold a machete.

The problem is not trivial. In February 2026, a non-governmental organisation, the Global Improvement of Less Privileged Persons Initiative (GIOPPINI), raised alarms that over two million underage children sleep in unsafe and unhygienic environments across Kano metropolis . According to their survey, these children—many of whom migrated from neighbouring states or rural communities under the pretext of seeking Quranic education—end up abandoned, disconnected from education, and drawn into street life that exposes them to crime, exploitation, and eventual conflict with the law.

The Kano State Bureau of Statistics has disputed this figure, citing its own mapping exercise that identified 6,573 street beggars across eight metropolitan local government areas. But even the official numbers tell a devastating story: youths aged 11 to 20 years constitute the largest demographic group at 56.4 per cent, while children aged 0 to 10 account for another seven per cent . The Bureau itself acknowledges that street begging is “strongly associated with youth vulnerability, poverty, unemployment, and limited access to education”.

The gang violence that erupted in Kabara and Magashi quarters on January 28, 2026—just weeks before my own experience—left one person dead and two others injured in a clash between rival thug groups. The arrested suspects were 20, 20, and 23 years old. Children, by any reasonable definition.

Many of these kids started off as almajiris. One recent analysis in Daily Trust put it, “What began centuries ago as a respected model of Islamic learning has, in its contemporary form, become one of the region’s most visible symbols of structural neglect.”

Across northern Nigeria, thousands of Almajiri children roam the streets—hungry, unsupervised, vulnerable, and excluded from meaningful participation in society. “The persistence of this system has placed a heavy burden on Northern Nigeria. It has strained urban infrastructure, deepened cycles of poverty, fuelled insecurity, and exposed children to exploitation, disease, and crime.”

Another recent commentary captured the moral urgency of the situation: “Almajiranci, as it exists today, is not culture. It is not spirituality. It is neglect dressed up as heritage. It is children pushed out of their homes in the name of learning, only to end up begging at traffic lights and sleeping in overcrowded rooms without care or protection. That is not education. That is abandonment.”

The Kano State Government has declared a state of emergency in education. But government action alone cannot fill the void left by absent parents and broken communities. Some are not even almajirai, they are simply kids abandoned by their parents.

Tupac’s lyric—”they only see the trouble”—haunts me. Those neighbors who wished death on the bleeding young men saw only the trouble: the muggings, the drugs, and the terror. They could not see—or perhaps could no longer afford to see—the neglected children who had become those monsters. “Picture me inside the misery of poverty,” Tupac rapped. “No man alive has ever witnessed struggles I survived / Prayin’ hard for better days” .

Every ghetto needs a Thugz Mansion, Tupac imagined—”a place where life’s a little easy,” where “all the troubles and pains of his life come to an end”. But such places do not exist for the street children of Kano. They have only the streets, which harden them into weapons that eventually turn on each other and on the society that rejected them.

This is an emergency. A call to action for all and sundry—not just the government, but every one of us. This is especially as the election season has kicked off, and the same politicians who stood before the world to declare a state of emergency would be the ones demanding the kind of services those gangs offer–the only skill they have: violence.

What can you do? Even a smile can go a long way. A kind word. A meal shared. Adopt them if you can. Show them care. Show them love in any way you can.

People love to hate such kids. But hatred only breeds what I witnessed that afternoon in Kano. What happens to someone who grows up not knowing love, knowing only hunger, pain, and despair? They become what we fear. And then we only see the trouble.