Of Population And Poverty

That our leaders are to blame for our myriad problems is such a common wisdom that it could well be the first abstract thought expressed by every Nigerian child. Among our pundits, there appears to be a competition to use the most stinging invectives to make the point.

We have variously described our leaders as plunderers, scoundrels, devils, Satan, cabals, locusts, and leeches. Reading some of these vitriolic renditions leave me wondering sometimes whether our leaders are implacable creatures from a cursed planet, who descended upon our otherwise blessed land and ravaged it. I’ve wondered, sometimes, whether they are a modern version of the Vandals, who plundered southern Europe and North Africa in the 5th to 6th century.

Yet, when we stare starkly at reality, we should have little trouble realising that those miscreants we love to excoriate are actually us. At least, they are our brothers and parents and uncles and nephews and nieces and cousins — and the rest of the extended family members.

They are the people we idolise and fawn before. They are the ones who occupy the front rows of churches and mosques. They are the ones who occupy the high chairs at ceremonies and dole out naira in bunches — to our applause.

Is this some kind of apologia for our leaders, some plea for empathy? Absolutely not. Quite a few of them deserve to be spat in the face and locked away in prisons.

Even then, the ever-so-popular our-leaders-are-to-blame thesis is a gross over-simplification. The reality is that there are societal trends that undercut development, even with the best efforts of the government.

Take the case of population. Two recent news stories about population growth — one in the United States and one in Nigeria — draw attention to its impact. The U.S. Census Bureau released figures last week, indicating that babies born to minorities — that is mostly blacks and Hispanics — now outnumber those born to white families.

That is not surprising because, for long, the black and Hispanic population has been growing at a faster rate than whites’. It is also not surprising that the economic gap between whites and minorities has been widening as well.

In the more salient case of Nigeria, the New York Times carried a story in April with the headline, “Nigeria tested by rapid rise in population.” The story quotes Peter Ogunjuyigbe, a demographer at Obafemi Awolowo University, as saying: “Population is key. If you don’t take care of population, schools can’t cope, hospitals can’t cope; there’s not enough housing — there’s nothing you can do to have economic development.”

Another population specialist, Prof. Joel E. Cohen, of Rockefeller University in New York, put the matter in a broader context: “The pace of growth in Africa is unlike anything else ever in history and a critical problem.”

The telling impact is that while the economies of most African countries have registered an overall impressive growth in the past two decades or so, the economic situation for many people has gotten worse. No, it is not because of corruption or mismanagement, as such. The economic growth is just outpaced by the population over-growth.

Well, population growth is more a function of culture than governance. Sure, there is a chicken-or-egg dimension to this argument to the extent that certain aspects of development actually lead to population decline. Thus, there is the paradox that people in developed countries tend to have fewer children, as do more educated people.

Still, one does not have to live in a developed country to appreciate the logic of family planning. In a sense, a country’s development is an aggregation of what happens in families.

If every couple succeeds in placing their children at a higher economic realm — without resort to activities that undermine society — that will result in generational leaps in development. But that is impossible when families have children far in excess of their shepherding capacity.

In Nigeria, women still have an average of 5.5 children. That is actually a 19.1 percentage decline in fertility rate, compared to 1975. And much of that drop comes from Southern Nigeria. In the North, the trend is upward, with women having an average of 7.3 children. That’s close to the rate for neighbouring Niger, which at 7.5 is the highest in the world.

In most other regions of the world, families are making concerted efforts to reduce the number of children. Up to 80 per cent of women of childbearing age in Asia are said to use birth control. In Africa, the figure is reportedly under 20 per cent.

China, of course, had to resort to the drastic one-child-per-family law. It is a policy that only a totalitarian country can adopt and enforce, but it has worked quite a bit. China’s population growth has slowed down dramatically. And that must have contributed to its recent economic surge.

But even with what is now the world’s second largest economy, China is still essentially a third world country. It still has about a billion impoverished people. The Chinese could well take the rest of this century to reach the level of affluence of Europeans and North Americans. There are just too many people to lift out of poverty.

As the Chinese of Africa, Nigerians are in the most vantage position to set the trend in population control. The government-recommended rate is four children per family.For most Nigerian couples, common sense would suggest three or fewer.

In the United States, women bear two children on average. In major countries of Western Europe, the figure is under two.

Population control is one area in which women have to provide the leadership for Nigeria and Africa in general. After all, they bear the most scars — literally and figuratively — of over-populated families. I envision a family planning campaign pivoted around the slogan, “Just say no after three.”

To get to this point, most African women will have to re-orientate themselves. The prevailing notion is that children are a blessing from God. But what couples do behind closed doors also have something to do with it. We can count our blessings up to three and stop.

BY MINABERE IBELEMA