Irrigation has been identified as a key to achieving food demand in the face of rapid increase in population and climate change impact. In northern Nigeria for example, irrigation practice has been adopted as an alternative to achieving in food production to meet the demand of the population. Nevertheless, the existing irrigation schemes encountered several challenges coming from the 5 basic sustainability pillars including social, environmental, economic, institutional and technological. This paper attempts to appraise the current state of irrigation schemes through revealing the underlined challenges confronting these schemes that cut across sustainability pillars. The findings discovered that irrigation schemes contributed immensely toward achieving food security and socio-economic development. However, the huge investment in irrigation sector have resulted in massive economic fatalities. This could be attributed to poor management, under-utilization, and abandonment even though few are performing remarkably well. Thus, there is a need to adopt new water sharing methods that can improve water-use efficiency, users-managers joint approach, building competent institutions with an improved monitoring, evaluation and surveillance systems. Others include frequent policy review, development of water conservation-base law enforcement agency as well as well-timed sensitization and awareness campaigns.