The 12-year insurgency in northeastern Nigeria has made criminals of many children who steal whatever they can to help bring in money so that their indigent families can put food on their tables.

Most parents know about their children’s thieving, some even condone it. Others are ashamed but, because they need the money, they do not say anything about it.

“It has become a matter of survival,” an internally displaced mother said.

RNI reporter Fatima Grema Modu spoke to a mother whose children had been on the streets stealing for many years.

Khadija Gambo was displaced from Babashe town in the Dikwa Local Government Area of Borno State. The mother of two young children said her husband was arrested six years ago. He was apparently being investigated for being involved with the Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’way Wa’l-Jihād (JAS), more commonly referred to as Boko Haram.

She said his arrest left her living in poverty with no means to feed her children or send them to school.

“It has been six years since soldiers took away my husband and handed him to government. We later learnt that he is being held in the maximum prison in Maiduguri. When they detained him, I could not afford to feed my children. I could not look after them properly. We lived in hunger,” Gambo said.

Sometimes they went to the forest looking for something that would sustain them but they were chased away by security forces because of the danger of being attacked by the JAS.

At the time, she said, she and her children were so hungry and so desperate to get food that they started begging. The children, aged nine and three, begged on the streets for money and/or food; anything they could get their hands on. She said she was not proud of it, in fact she felt ashamed.

“Sometimes we went without food for three to four days. I felt terrible about how I was starving my children. My neighbours gave us some food at times but whatever we got I fed to my children. To make the food last, I would eat just a little. Sometimes my relatives and my in-laws helped us. But they have families of their own to provide for and the time came when they could no longer help us. Now we are all facing hunger. We need the government to help us. It is a very difficult situation,” Gambo said.

In recent years her children had stopped begging and instead they had begun to steal from people. “Now it is a habit. They go where they want and steal from whomever they can. There is no stopping them. They do not listen to me. I feel ashamed of their actions. They need their father to instill discipline.”

She said she was not the only woman whose husband had been arrested. “I plead with the government to please consider releasing our husbands because we need their help. Our children’s behaviour is out of control. We need them by our sides to help us curb our kids’ stealing.”

Gambo said she did not think the government was being fair. “Right now they are accepting surrendered armed insurgents. They are providing places where they can be rehabilitated. Then they will be allowed to return to their communities. But the government is still not releasing our husbands who did not do anything wrong.”

She said in the six years of her husband’s detention, she had been mocked by people, some of whom had advised her to remarry. But she insisted that she would wait for the government to release him.

She said she was very ashamed her children had turned to crime and blamed it on the government which had kept their father away from the family.

“The absence of a father is a terrible thing. If the government releases my husband, we will be able to live as a normal family again. We can raise our children properly.”