Sonnie Ekwowusi
25 September 2002
Lagos — Population issues have once more re-surfaced in the front burner of public discourse. I watched the edition of the Patito's gang which dealt with the issues on Minaj TV on August, 3l, 2002.
Prior to this, the honourable Minister of Health, professor A.B.C Nwosu was quoted as saying that over population was responsible for the poor quality of life and standard of living in Nigeria (See THISDAY, July 12, 2002 P.4). First, anybody who is conversant with what Rev. Fr. George Ehusani dubbed in his book as the complex politics of population control in Africa and the Third World which reached its crescendo in the 80s will understand that Nwosu was neither speaking for himself nor for the federal government. Certainly, he was speaking for the neo-colonialists and powerful international agencies like the IMF, World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) etc which have been ceaselessly labouring to reduce the population of Third World countries. They have been achieving this goal through powerful, advocacy and by making population reduction a pre-condition for granting developmental aids to developing countries.
Their popular hype goes this way; "Nigeria is over-populated. Consequently, quality of life in Nigeria is low. Therefore, if Nigeria needs any loan or other assistance from the IMF or the World Bank, the pre-condition is that she must be ready to reduce her population through compulsory mass sterilization of men and women, infanticide, abortion, euphemistically referred to as family planning etc". Part of the strategy is to put something in women to make them impotent, unable to bear children in the future. Can you imagine your wife coming back from a government hospital with her womb closed without your consent?. I heard that some of these "do-gooders" carrying out immunization programme do mix the vaccines they administer to kids with other concoctions capable of making the kids impotent for life. So, parents beware! You can see how desperate these people are in reducing our population.
There are many sinister motives behind the well-funded advocacy for the reduction of the population of Africa. Some argue that because Europe and America are becoming extinct they are bent on perpetually keeping the African population under control for fear that Africa might rise one day to become a world power. You may dismiss this as a simplistic and illogical reasoning but you might change your mind after the excursion into the history of Margaret Sanger, birth control and her Magazine called the Woman rebel, Marie Stopes, Charles Darwin and the superior race theory, Rev. Thomas Malthus theory, International Planned Parenthood Federation of London which begot Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria. I think that after the scramble for Africa by the turn of the 19th century, another insidious and pernicious scramble has been persistent in the continent. Whereas the first scramble was largely motivated by commercial interest, the second scramble hinges on distorting the social economic and political reality of Africa or what Tunji Bello has dubbed as the American doctoring system. One of these major distorting or doctoring is that Africa is suffering from hunger and disease due to over population. Consequently, the African soil has remained a testing and re-cycling ground for all sorts of strange ideas and propaganda. The American connection in this game plan through the USAID is evident. This body has spent scores of years supplying contraceptives and funding population control in Africa and Nigeria.
The population propaganda has been successfully sold to successive Health Ministers in Nigeria. In 1987, USAID and the Federal government under the wooing-hands of Professor Ransome-Kuti, the then Health Minister, spent a staggering sum of N288 million on the government population policy of one-woman-four children. Of course that policy, being the most fragrant abuse of human and family right, failed woefully.
Today, Nwosu is the latest victim of Western conspiracy. He is again following their written script from the same re-cycled erroneous idea of yesteryears.
In the 80s they used all kinds of adjectives and coined such frightening terms as population "explosion"bomb" etc to illustrate the demographic catastrophe that will befall Nigeria if she failed to heed the call and reduce her population. Even journalists, writers, artists, TV presenters, musicians were recruited to forecast a false demographic Armageddon. Remember Sunny Ade and Onyeka Onwenu's album entitled "Wait for me"?
By the mid 90s it seemed as if the hype on the population hoax was drowned. No. The propagandists and doomsayers had only changed tactics. Impelled by the HIV/AIDS scourge they have shifted from population explosion to the marketing of condoms. One of them said that AIDS is good for Africa because it will reduce her high population. Now that the population doomsayers are staging a dramatic come back, let's ask this old same question: Is Nigeria truly or really over populated. The answer is emphatic No. Granted that Nigeria demographic position is highly politicised, our population could be somewhere around 130 million, if I am not wrong. It is wrong for one to calculate the population of Nigeria by just looking at the large concentration of people in one's locality. For example, after being shocked by the countless sea of human heads at Oshodi, Lagos one cannot conclude that Nigeria is over populated. Everybody is in Lagos. My village is depleted because most village folks have fled in search of elusive jobs in Lagos. The same thing, I guess, applies to your village folks. Lagos is over populated but Nigeria is certainly not over populated.
But let's close our eyes for one moment and assume that Nigeria is over population. Is over population a curse ?. Can population growth lead to falling standard of living? The answers are double No. The anti- population argument is that if there are many people sharing the same cake, it will get smaller and smaller. They forget that the same people will not continue to eat one cake because they can bake more cakes so that could satisfy everybody. Besides, extremely densely populated countries like Monaco, Singapore, Hong Kong even Japan that recently co-hosted the World Cup enjoy higher standard of living. In fact high population is inversely related to the Gross National Product (GNP). The higher a country's population, the higher its GNP.
Conversely, the lower the population the lower the GNP. Most renowned economists affirm that rapid population density is not an obstacle to economic development. What may be an obstacle is the rate of growth but not the growth itself. High population remains the key indicator of industrial growth. The causes of unemployment, poverty, street begging in Nigeria are mismanagement of the economy, inefficiency of government, monumental corruption, plundering of national treasury, government over spending and over subsidy, executive robbery either by the stroke of the pen or barrel of the gun. Not over population. Think of the monies stolen by our past leaders?. If all those stolen monies were recovered and directly spent on things that could improve the lot of the people, Nigeria would have been a better place today. As Mahatma Ghandi rightly said, there is enough for every man's need but not for every man's greed. We are a greedy lot. This is why we are plagued by genteel poverty amidst our natural and human resources. Was it not Alhaji Tafawa Balewa who said our political independence was nothing if not matched with economic independence?.
Today, everybody talks oil, dreams oil. All our stakes are in oil. Nobody is interested in agriculture or subsistence farming any longer. That Nigeria is the 26th poorest country in the world is not caused by over population. It is caused primarily by sheer neglect for others sectors and lack of productivity. All our National Development Plans from that of 1962 downward failed due to lack of implementation. For example, our Third Development Plan harped on food production. The then Obasanjo/Murtala military regime fashioned a slogan for food production called the Operation Feed the Nation (OFN). Shehu Shagari coined the Green Revolution. We even had the Umaru Dikko rice, the integrated rural agricultural programme, National accelerated food production programme etc. But they all failed principally due to corruption and mismanagement. Perhaps, if they had worked we would not be complaining about our population. The food crisis worsens every day. The oil boom is becoming our doom. The Naira currency has continued to noose-dive and depreciate in value.
The painful thing is that the solution seems not to be in sight. Now many of our political office holders are so pre-occupied with their respective re-election gambits that they have no time to think about the welfare of the people.
Ekwowusi writes from Lagos
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