Africa Is a Country

Nigeria’s baby boom

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Nigeria’s baby boom

By
Cheta Nwanze

Each year more babies are born in Nigeria than in the entire continent of Europe.

Image: World Bank.

Yesterday, a statement was credited to Bob Diamond, former CEO of Barclays, who is attending the World Economic Jamboree in Abuja. Mr. Diamond is credited with saying:  “Nigeria is the place to be if you want manufacture diapers.”

Mr. Diamond is right on that count. But, that statement is not just about diapers, neither is it just about attracting the likes of Procter and Gamble, who just opened a huge manufacturing plant in Agbara, Ogun state. There is a more hidden meaning to that, one I think Mr. Diamond may have come across before, so let’s look at that statement a bit more.

Nigeria is experiencing a baby boom.

Between 2008 and 2011, 5.4 million babies were born in Europe. I mean Europe, not the European Union. In 2008 alone, 6 million babies were born in Nigeria. In 2009, it was 5.9 million babies, in 2010, 5.8 million. By 2011, the number had swung back up to just over 6 million, and in 2012, 6.7 million babies were born to Nigerian women. In each year in a four year period, Nigeria produced more babies per year than Europe in the entire four years under review.

In just under two decades, each of these kids will be ready to go into the work force. We have to ask critical questions.

Is Nigeria capable of giving each one of the 30.4 million new additions in the time period under review an education? With the way things stand, when less than 95,000 people write the common entrance, I think not.

Nigeria lacks infrastructure, so we will need polytechnics more than we will need universities for these young ones. Our polytechnics have been shut for ten months now, so a backlog is already growing that will take years to clear.

Asides that, we will need to create jobs for them to go into when done with education. Our policies don’t encourage SMEs. SMEs are the backbone of any economy, not civil service, definitely not multinationals or foreign investors. Where are our SMEs? They cannot get credit from banks, so the vast majority of them fold up before their first birthday.

Let’s face it folks, we are sitting on a demographic time bomb, and at this rate, even if we defeat Boko Haram, someone else will take their place.

Further Reading

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.