Vice president Yemi Osinbajo recently said that the population growth of the country will cause many challenges. He called on the World Health Organisation to make Nigeria a priority. The vice president’s call came just as the National Population Commission revealed that the country’s population grew by 50 million in 12 years.
Also, in June 2013, the United Nations World Population Prospects revealed that Nigeria’s population would surpass that of the U.S before the middle of the century and that by the end of this century, Nigeria could start to rival China as the second most populous country in the world.
In addition, Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa and the seventh most populated country in the world with an estimated population of over 198 million. Recently, the World Population Prospects predicted that by 2050, Nigeria will become the third most populated country in the world. In addition, over the last 50 years, Nigeria’s urban population has been growing at an average annual growth rate of more than 6.5 per cent without a commensurate increase in social amenities and infrastructure thus leading to overcrowding and inadequate social and economic infrastructure in the urban centres.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) also put the population of Nigerians in poverty at about 112 million, or more than 67 per cent of the country’s population. There is no doubting the fact that these are worrisome signs and they are already posing great challenges to the development of the country, especially in the healthcare, education and food security sectors.
These facts, when juxtaposed against the fact that Nigeria is home to the world’s poorest of the poor people in the world, means that urgent steps must therefore be taken to streamline the population policy of the country to ensure that the country can cope with its alarming growth without corresponding ability to feed, educate, and provide adequate healthcare and jobs for the new mouths that are being born.
On the face of it, the rapid growth of Nigeria’s population should be a plus to the country. Unfortunately, this is not so. Rather, it spells disaster for the country for a number of factors, among which are the ever-increasing unemployment, abject poverty, lack of basic amenities, poor economy and others.
More worrisome to Nigerians is that these negative effects of the ever increasing population of the country have not discouraged the generality of Nigerians from reproducing or adopting family planning methods, neither is the Federal Government seeing it as warranting an effective national policy on population growth.
Some states such as Lagos State are actively promoting the adoption of family planning by families as a way of checking unplanned procreation. But the Federal Government has no known policy on it. Yet, planned procreation issue is of national importance and the Federal Government should actually be at the vanguard of it by formulating and adopting a national policy on it and actively promote such a policy.
As things are, if the ever increasing population is not checked now by the adoption of a population policy and actively promoting it, the country may have the challenge of overpopulation in its hands with its attendant inability to cope with it and its consequent challenges.
For Nigerians, the consequences of rapid increase in population of the country without corresponding economic and technological development and growth are lack of jobs, lack of basic amenities, poor standard of living, rapid development of rural and urban squalors, food insecurity, mass poverty, undernourishment, underdevelopment and misery. More worrisome is the poor image of the country and its government that such a situation will transmit to the whole world.
These scenarios are scary but are not impossible if necessary actions are not taken by all levels of governance now to check the rapid growth in the country’s population through affordable family planning methods. The time for the various levels of governance to act is now and not later.Going forward, against the backdrop of unwanted consequences of the rapid increase in the country’s population, all levels of governance in the country, particularly the Federal Government, must put in place new policy on population control and follow it up with action plans that would decrease the rate of increase in the population.
