A speaker from Kano, Nigeria describes how extreme child poverty creates a pipeline to radicalization and violence. He argues that powerful actors deliberately maintain these conditions to turn vulnerable youths into weapons, and calls on religious leaders to move beyond motivational talk and actually pursue justice as a biblical mandate.
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I grew up in the northern part of Nigeria, Kano precisely. I've had child experiences in places like Fontua, Malufashi, down to Niger Republic as one growing up. So I can tell you some things about the north. Experientially, one of the most fascinating things growing up was seeing young children like us sleeping on the street, carrying plates, begging for food in harsh weather conditions, walking barefooted. Now I look at it, if you copy and paste the experience of those kids, now it's very easy for them to be bandits. Get ransom worth billions on behalf of some people, sleep in the cleft of the rocks in different harsh conditions in the bush. They've become weapons of religion, weaponized by people who clothe with religion but have other intentions. The people that we have around us today that are not catered for, that we often ignore, are tomorrow's weapon. And those who radicalize them have systemically built a system that keeps them in that situation so that tomorrow it will be easy to convince them to do every other thing. What I'm saying is poverty in this part of the world, injustice, is engineering. We cannot sit down and say we are Christians, pastors, whatever it is you think you are. And every time people bring conversations around this area that God wants us to cater for the poor, he wants us to be concerned about the needy, he wants there to be justice in the society, you reduce it to motivational speaking. You are the problem of tomorrow. We think Christianity is just sitting in church, clapping our beautiful hands and whatever it is we think we have. The problem is when you see these things arise tomorrow, you will not come back to apologize. This is a call to all Christians. Let's be our brothers' keepers. We all have one common enemy, both those that are weaponized and those they are weaponizing people against. The earlier we realize this, the faster it is for us to get a change. The God of the Bible is a God of justice.
