Nigeria's rapid population growth and policy implications

Population Studies: Nigeria
Introduction
Purpose
As one of the most densely populated nations in the world today, Nigeria is growing quickly. It is the most populated country in all of Africa, the 7th most populated country in the entire world, and contains approximately 200 million people across 920,000 square kilometers (CIA Factbook, 2019). The UN expects Nigeria’s population to surpass that of the United States by 2050 (Provost, 2013). Nigeria is also extremely ethnically diverse with more than 250 different ethnic groups. The majority groups and the percentage of the population that they make up are: Hausa 27.4%, Igbo 14.1%, Yoruba 13.9%, Fulani 6.3%, Tiv 2.2%, Ibibio 2.2%, Ijaw/Izon 2%, Kanuri/Beriberi 1.7%, Igala 1%, other 28.9%, and unspecified .2% (CIA Factbook, 2019). Because of this incredible diversity and population growth—the population of the country has quadrupled since the 1960s (Worldometers, 2019)—population policy in Nigeria has to consider the context, history, and factors that have impacted and are impacted by the increase in the nation’s population. As Nigeria is attempting to develop into a significant power on the world stage, it has to address the factors surrounding its massive population growth—such as oil, industry, terrorism, and economic trade and stability. Because of the lack of infrastructure to support this growth, many people struggle. For example, Nigeria’s education system is at full capacity, but only a quarter of those who apply for university in the country can gain admittance (Kazeem, 2018). As a result, unemployment has doubled in the country (Kazeem, 2018). While on the one hand, population growth has spurred Nigeria’s economic growth (Etebong, 2018), on the other hand the factor of lack of infrastructure has complicated the stability of the country’s social, economic and political positioning, as the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (2019) has pointed out. The purpose of this paper is to address that issue and describe recommendations for the country’s population policy.
Overall Population Growth Trend
Research for this paper was conducted by consulting the various references pertaining to population in nations throughout the world, using Google Scholar as a search engine. The results of the research show that Nigeria’s fertility rate is just behind that of China and India with 20,210 new babies born on Jan. 1, 2018 (Kazeem, 2018). This means Nigeria’s population growth is not slowing but rather is continuing in a big way. This poses a problem to some extent, as the population growth is also fueled by migration. In nearby Gambia, which is 90% Islamic, there is the threat of terrorism from Boko Haram (Touray, 2015)., and this means Nigeria has to address issues of security and stability—which is difficult with such a rapidly swelling population.

(Kazeem, 2018)

The overall population growth trend for Nigeria has been phenomenal over the past five decades, as the chart below shows. In 1950, the population of Nigeria was just 37,859,000. When oil began to be a big part of the economy and migration from other nations in Africa began to flow through Nigeria, the country’s population rose sharply over the next five decades. The chart below shows how rapidly Nigeria’s population has increased in the last 20 years alone. Nigeria is attempting to lead the African continent in terms of development—but it has a long way to go to meet the needs of its growing population.


(Worldometers, 2019)
Component Analysis
Fertility, mortality and migration (past and current trend and possible future trend) all show that Nigeria is heading towards a becoming one of the most populated nations in the world. The fertility rate is stable, migration is increasing through Nigeria, and the mortality rate is expected to increase slightly from 7% to 9% by 2050, though life expectancy is also expected to increase to 75 years of age by then as well (Dyson, 2010). Thus, the overall trends all show that more babies are being born, people are living longer, and the population is increasing steadily and will likely overtake the U.S. soon, where fertility rates are falling substantially as the culture in the U.S. becomes more accepting of birth control.
The major issue here is that the culture in Nigeria is not the same as in the liberal Western world, so approaching the topic of population policy from the standpoint of population control will not have the same effects as it has in the U.S. where there is more of a liberal culture in place. In Nigeria, the Muslim and Christian communities are not nearly as liberal as they are rooted more in a traditional sense of what it means to have families, duties and responsibilities.
However, there is also another side to that story, for in the Muslim tradition, education of women is not seen as a top priority, and this prevents the nation’s literacy rate from rising, which negatively impacts the employment rate, and keeps the economic stability of the nation from reaching a better level. The population continues to grow, however, because Nigeria is recognized as the leading nation in Africa and as a member of ECOWAS, which is an important economic partnership among several African states. Nigeria is a wealthy country because of its oil, but it still needs to develop a proper leadership system. Nonetheless, people from throughout Africa come to Nigeria for opportunity or as immigrants. The improvements in the nation have helped to ensure that health is better taken care of for those who can afford it. This is why mortality rates are not increasing exponentially. Were Nigeria truly more of a third world country, the mortality rates would be much higher. Nigeria’s problem is that there is too much corruption in the government, which destabilizes the population. Though the population is growing because of high fertility rates and longer life expectancy, the nation is not really serving the population. This is why change is needed in the country and why a population policy is needed that will address the issues of the communities rather than offer a way to try to control them.
Major Demographic Issues
As half of Nigeria’s population lives in its cities, this presents certain issues in terms of how the infrastructure of the nation can support the population. Simply maintaining room in the city’s universities has become a problem, as three-quarters of all applicants have to be denied. This condition worsens the problems of the city, because education is so important to advancement. This is also an issue because education rates are not as high as they should be. Literacy remains low at just 47% in the country (Etebong, 2018). As Etebong (2018) points out, “according to the 2008 DHS, about 36 percent of women have no formal schooling. The mean years of education appear to have decreased between the two DHS surveys, which indicate poor educational policy or poor data quality and implementation of programs” (p. 2). It is believed that illiteracy is responsible for “poverty, diseases, insecurity, homelessness, unemployment; and general backwardness” and that a “high rate of illiteracy among the Nigerian women will increase the rate of teenage pregnancy that in turns increases the fertility rate which eventually leads to overpopulation” (Etebong, 2018, p. 2). Thus, solving the demographic issue of education is an important one for the country.
Because of the amount of migration that passes through the country and the porous nature of its borders, as well as the lack of infrastructure required for governing such a large population, Nigeria has a considerable drug trafficking problem: “The most profitable activity of the Nigerian groups is drug trafficking: delivering heroin from Southeast and Southwest Asian into Europe and the U.S. and cocaine from South America into Europe and South Africa” (Global Security, 2018). The migration of so many different people through Nigeria is one of the most important demographic issues that the country faces, as it leads to the corruption in the government, society and in the nation’s economic plans. Corruption through the drug trade and through the support of terrorist networks is linked to the unemployment and problem of literacy that leads to poverty in the nation. To address this issue, the nation needs to focus more directly on how to help the various demographics in the country—from migrants to women who historically suffer from low literacy rates in the country. Safety and security have to be top priorities for the country, but currently the top priorities in terms of population policy are linked instead to trying to curb the population rather than find ways to serve it, safeguard it, and help the population to reach its potential.
Foreign direct investment could be one way to help address the demographic issues (Oguanobi, Akamobi, Aniebo & Mgbemena, 2014), and working with neighboring Gambia to strengthen the economic stability of the region could be another (The Standard, 2018). However, because so many people are locating in urban areas, it draws resources from other parts of the country resulting in desertification (Etebong, 2018). Meeting the economic needs of the populace is the major issue that needs to be addressed in Nigeria.
Population Policy
History
Nigeria’s current population policy includes promoting contraception in order to curb the fertility rate of the country. As Kazeem (2018) points out, “the modern contraceptive prevalence rate among married women increased to 9.8%—far less than the 30.2% policy target.” This approach to population policy is rooted in the concept of control more than it is in the concept of support. Part of the problem is that in Nigeria, there is no real sense of how to support a growing population or what is needed. The culture is simply not developed in terms of addressing these needs and leadership is not helpful in the matter. The nation’s approach to census taking is a perfect example of this lack of leadership. Because leaders want their own people counted more than once whenever a census is taken, the actual statistics and figures are never accurate (Etebong, 2018). This results in a false view of the population and its needs. In order to develop an effective population policy, the leaders need to develop a better understanding of who is actually in Nigeria.
Other than these approaches to population policy, Nigeria has a very limited plan for addressing the needs of the population. Its focus is on controlling either the narrative or the population itself—and neither is really effective or working. Today, Nigeria has no effective strategy in place for addressing environmental concerns related to shifting demographics, no real economic solutions, no substantial political leadership and plan for addressing migration.
Critique
The problem with Nigeria’s contraceptive policy is that it goes mostly against the grain of the religious and ethnic beliefs of the Nigerian population, which is why fewer than the 10% of the population use contraception. Half of the country’s population is Christian and the other half is Muslim (Diamant, 2019), and both are traditional religious communities that do not promote the use of contraception in their core value systems. This means that Nigeria’s approach to population policy has been flawed from the start. Instead of accepting the cultural values of the populace, it has attempted to promote new cultural values that are alien to the populations that are in Nigeria. According to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, culture has to be an important consideration in any type of policy that is created to guide and support a populace (Hofstede, 1998; Nakata, 2009). By addressing the culture of the demography of Nigeria, the government would be better able to address the demographic needs and provide a more effective approach to fixing infrastructure, providing both Muslim and Christian populations with what they require, addressing migrant issues, and creating a stronger military in which there is respect for the rule of law rather than dereliction of duty. Currently there is little respect for the rule of law in Nigeria (Diamond, 2008) and this relates to the population issues in that inculcating a sense of law and respect for law would be a better approach to policy than what Nigeria is currently attempting.
Suggestions
Foreign direct investment could be one way to help address the demographic issues, and working with neighboring Gambia to strengthen the economic stability of the region could be another (The Standard, 2018). Nigeria is already set up as an economic partner in ECOWAS, and the EU has shown interest in making Nigeria a substantial trade partner. With this kind of relationship, more investment in Nigeria could follow and that would help the nation to create a population policy that actually addresses the needs of the community rather than serves as a tool for the government to try to control or limit the population—a tool that does not ultimately work.
The key policy measure that should be used to guide the policy towards population is one that considers what the population actually wants. A population policy should reflect the cares and considerations of the population. After all, the state is there to serve the populace not the populace to serve the state. The populace, no matter how big it grows, has to be supported—not undermined. The population policy regarding the promotion of contraception is one that seeks to undermine the cultural and core value systems of the two main ethnic communities in the nation—the Muslim community and the Christian community—both of whom are thoroughly traditional in their approaches to sex and sexuality. Both traditionally view sex as a procreative act, and to introduce contraception into the state and expect it to be embraced is to expect the two traditional communities to suddenly reject their own core values and principles. This is a flawed approach to population policy at best.
A better approach would be to support the needs of the communities. The Muslim community clearly has its own core values aside from sending women to school for education. Therefore, the state should find a way to support this community and assist it in upholding its core values by conducting surveys to see what the community wants in terms of a working infrastructure, economic development, community needs and so on. The same should go for the Christian communities. The challenge here will be that these communities can intertwine and can live in the same regions, though in many cases they will also already be segregated and on their own.
To understand what policy approach should best be implemented, it is therefore important to conduct an accurate census that is free of political corruption. Every political faction will want to sway the census so that it reflects the faction as being greater than it may actually be. Therefore, it is important to have a government that is willing and capable of looking at the reality of the situation in Nigeria and delivering an accurate census.
To achieve the accurate census and to obtain a working model of who is actually in the population of Nigeria, the government should be ideologically indifferent to political and cultural aims and influences. It should survey the populaces to see what sort of core values they want to promote and the government should then incorporate the common ground among those core values into its official population policy. This means that attempting to control the population through contraception will likely be abandoned. A better approach to regulating the population growth, if such is desired, would be through the regulation and flow of migration into the country. As Nigeria is the most important state in Africa, it is looked upon as the place to go by unhappy neighbors in other states. To control migration, the state needs to secure its borders, and to do that it needs to have some sort of cultural unity in terms of how it approaches the populace.
The best approach therefore is for the state to survey the population and to understand who and what groups it needs to support the most. It needs to recognize the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats within its own population. In other words, the government needs to conduct a SWOT analysis of its own population and then harness the strengths of its communities and develop competencies or find ways to work around weaknesses. It has to identify opportunities for development so that the culture that can be the most supportive and constructive will have the opportunity to grow organically and develop. If there is a need for housing, for example, the Christian and Muslim populations may be able to provide it through charitable organizations that aim to assist those in need. As both cultures embrace this type of activity it should not be difficult to work with these groups and develop a plan of support that will allow the population to be served rather than controlled.
In this manner, Nigeria will be able to have a strong, growing population that will be economically viable and supportive, while also seeing that the needs of the population—whether they are shelter, food, education, or security—are all met through the government’s collaboration with the communities that make up the majority of the state’s population. There can be no successful policy plan without a recognition of the dominant cultures within the state. The policy should reflect the values of the populace. The policy should not set about placing on the population its own set of standards and rules. The best approach for the government to take would be for it to authorize the communities to develop plans at a local level to serve their populations accordingly. This would allow for organic solutions to be found that can have economic, social and political viability for the long term. Growth is not threatened by population; it is threatened by lack of cultural development and integration. That is what Nigeria’s leaders need to realize and recognize in their policy plan development. The sooner they recognize this fact, the better off the population will be and the stronger the culture of the state will grow.
References
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