“I need some Nyus worth Shs500,” says a boy of about twelve on a backstreet in Lira City, handing a piece of brown cloth to an older friend holding a bottle of clear liquid.
“I’m not high yet,” he adds.
The older boy takes the cloth without a word, dips it into the bottle for a slow count of ten, and hands it back. The younger one presses the damp fabric to his nose and mouth and breathes in.
The bottle holds jet fuel – the drug of choice for a growing population of children who have made the streets of Lira their home. They call it Nyus. It is cheap, it is everywhere, and it is quietly destroying them.
Researchers describe jet fuel not as a single chemical but as a kerosene-based cocktail of hundreds of hydrocarbons and additives. Depending on the grade and how long and often a person is exposed, the damage ranges from short-lived irritation to serious, lasting disease. Sniffed daily, as many of Lira’s street children do, the short-term high gives way to systemic harm.
Children nobody is raising
No one has an exact count of how many children survive on Lira’s streets today. The last reliable estimate, from 2020, put the number at around 200. Aid workers and local leaders believe it has only grown since.
Most arrive from villages across the wider Lango Sub-region, pushed out by poverty, domestic violence, or the fallout of HIV/AIDS. Few find real work in the city. Instead, they scavenge – collecting plastic bottles and scrap metal to sell for a few hundred shillings. To cope with hunger, exposure and fear, many turn to the cheapest drugs they can find.
Brian is one of them. Now 17, he walked from neighbouring Oyam District to Lira City at the age of 10, driven out by a fractured home.
“My mother had problems with my father. She had two men, and she claims one of them is my father,” Brian says.
“She wanted me to go and live with a man who drinks and doesn’t even have a proper house. But the man I’ve always known as my father lived in Oyam. He treated me well and gave me everything – but my mother didn’t want him raising me.”
Unable to stay in a home he no longer recognised, Brian left after his mother separated from both men.
“I ended up leaving, the same way I came – to where she now stays, in Angwetangwet, here in Lira City,” he says.
Life on the street pulled him toward what nearly every child there eventually reaches for. Hungry and unable to quiet his mind, Brian started sniffing jet fuel. He now spends around Shs1,000 a day on two bottle-cap measures.
“When I smell Nyus, I fall asleep easily. It takes my worries away,” he says. “I know it isn’t good for my health. But it’s the thoughts in my head that push me to sniff it.”
A law with little reach
Uganda has had legislation against this for more than a decade. On April 9, 2015, President Yoweri Museveni signed the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act into law.
It criminalises the recruitment or encouragement of drug use, and holds accountable anyone who manages a property used to grow, sell or manufacture narcotic substances.
On the streets of Lira, it barely registers.
Dr Andrew Odur, Senior Executive Consultant at Lira Regional Referral Hospital, says the rise in youth addiction threatens more than individual lives.
“Substance abuse among young people keeps climbing, and its effects don’t go away,” Dr Odur says.
“Getting someone off drugs once they’re addicted is extremely difficult. The real question is why so many young people are turning to drugs in the first place. Where is it starting – the school environment, the home environment? Is the city even safe for them?”
That question found some answers in a 2024 study by Francis Mukaga Macho, a final-year Public Health student at Lira University. The research found a lifetime substance-use prevalence of 56.3 percent among the 403 students surveyed, with alcohol the most commonly abused substance. It also identified a pattern of “poly-substance” use – students mixing alcohol with cigarettes or marijuana.
The strongest predictors were social: students whose friends used substances were twice as likely to use them too, while a family history of substance abuse raised the risk by 1.7 times.
When the rains fail
Drug abuse is not the only force undermining Lango’s recovery from decades of conflict. Climate change is compounding the damage.
Across the sub-region – Amolatar, Alebtong, Apac, Dokolo, Kole, Kwania, Lira, Otuke and Oyam districts, plus Lira City – families are confronting food insecurity after prolonged drought wiped out much of what was planted in the first season.
Denis Owani, an agricultural officer for Aromo Sub-county in Lira District, says the Dam Odoca solar-powered irrigation scheme has become a lifeline as rain-fed farming collapses. Maize and soybean crops failed outright this season.
“It has been extremely dry for the past three months. I looked into this with the farmers myself, and the losses have been significant,” Owani said.
Mary Adongo, a farmer in Amorigoga Village, Abongomola Sub-county in Kwania District, says the unpredictability makes it dangerous.
“When production falls, food prices rise – not just here, but across other parts of Uganda too,” she says.
Taken separately, each crisis would be a serious setback for a region still rebuilding. Together – children sniffing jet fuel to survive the street, university students sliding into poly-substance use, farmers watching harvests die – they form a pattern local leaders are struggling to break.
For now, interventions remain piecemeal: a solar irrigation project here, a hospital consultant sounding the alarm there, a researcher publishing recommendations yet to become policy.
Meanwhile, in Lira City, another child will likely hand over Shs500 for a piece of cloth and a bottle of jet fuel before the day is out.