Nigeria's population issues

Post script: Please bear with me, get a glass of water, this is going to be long...

Before I get crucified, I have to make one thing clear: I don't think the figures from the 2006 census are accurate. Nigeria doesn't have just 140 millions, that is a gross under estimate. We are closer to the 200 mark. After all, some people I know weren't counted, the population of Lagos was grossly underestimated, and the East was all but left out. I also have to take sides with my fellow Southerners and bloggers, in this case David and Anthony in saying that as is usual, the Northerners in order to up their ante produced all the chickens and cows in their households for counting. I would also want to agree with a comment that I saw on Omodudu's blog that there must be at least 4 women to every man in Nigeria. That way there would be more than enough females to go round to satisfy our polygamous tendencies. I have to strongly disagree with the enumerator who told a friend of mine that: would you believe that each aboki family he counted in Abuja had an average of 27 members. some had as much as 43! Finally, I have to agree with my cousin that once again the government in the centre have enacted another evil scheme to throw a spanner in the wheels of the Igbo juggernaut. Now I have agreed to all the allegations, every one should be happy.

But let us for once throw sentiment out of the window, and sit down to analyse these results, the impact of the results. why people are so concerned about the results, and most importantly, what our focus should actually be. Since goats and cows were counted in one part of the country instead of people, doesn't that reduce the population from even the 140 million that was announced?

We have to stop being sentimental and ask ourselves the question that a lot of us in the South don't even want to consider: Suppose it is true that the North is really more populated than the South? Let's at least give it a thought. I think most of us are so prejudiced that once things do not agree with our expectations, we look for all sorts of ways to discredit them.


Ndi Igbo

Let me as is usual begin with 'my constituency', ndi Igbo...

I read somewhere that Ohaneze have rejected the result. Pity I can't find the link, but that is academic. My question is this: where was Ohaneze when the MASSOB youths were busy disrupting the smooth conduct of the census in the East? Where was Ohaneze when an enumerator was sprayed with acid in Onitsha? Where were they when one was killed for trying to do his job? Why didn't they categorically come out then to call those miscreants to order? There are more than enough stories of people who refused to be counted because they are not Nigerian, they are 'Biafran'. What ignorant bollocks! What has that stupid boycott achieved for us except to fall our hand? We need to learn to bargain with what we have in hand while preparing for other eventualities. Granted people should have a right to self determination (I have to make it clear yet again that I don't believe in the Biafran nightmare, it just doesn't make sense), but the question I'd like to ask some of these people is this: 'If your Biafra 'dream' fails nko? By boycotting the census y'all will be short-changed for another 10 years, and who will you blame? Who else can you blame? My mother used to say a bird in hand...


Lagos

Now let's turn our attentions to the Lagos State government that quickly joined the bandwagon of result condemnation...

I gather that Funsho Williams' widow won the Lagos State PDP primaries only for her victory to be given to Musiliu Obanikoro amid statements that a "Lagos man" was needed to give PDP a chance in the elections. (Hilda Williams 'hails' from Rivers State, in case you were wondering.) The question in the minds of those idiots wasn't whether she would be a capable administrator, but rather that she wasn't an indigene of the state. They also seemed to forget that based on all Nigerian cultures a woman automatically becomes an 'indigene' of her husband's place.

Let's be honest, in Lagos (as in other parts of Nigeria), the PDP isn't the only party guilty of this indigene-settler bullshit. I wonder just how many Lagos 'indigenes' there are since the state belongs to only them. Shouldn't that be thrown up as a valid question since in apparent terms Lagos belongs only to the omo Eko? So people, just how many Lagosians are there really?

Having talked about the immediate issue briefly, I'd also like to digress a little and talk about that which has worried me for a very long time, the 'indigene'-settler dichotomy we have in our country. Please refer to the line from Bob Marley's song War where he refered to first class and second class citizens of a nation. We have been running that bull shit in Naija for a long time now, and without any apologies, I lay the blame squarely at the feet of the great Obafemi Awolowo. Had he not initiated the carpet crossing in the Western House of Parliament when he was defeated by Nnamdi Azikiwe, I would probably be able to run for Edo State governor today.

I was born and brought up in Benin City see, and I feel more comfortable when people around me are speaking either Edo or Pidgin, than when they are speaking Igbo (which I tend to stammer through anyway). But because of that stupid 'indigene'-settler stuff which we have running in this country, I'd have to travel many miles eastward if I want to become involved in politics, to a place where I don't really know the issues because I don't live there.

Isn't it funny that Nigerians would go to the US, the UK, Canada, Ireland or wherever to have children so that such kids could lay claim to being citizens of such countries, but in our own country, a man born and bred in Kano would be told to go back to Warri to contest an election simply because his grandfather came from there. That is stupidity. How we are ever going to build one Nigeria with this kind of utter nonsense going on.

Back to the census...

For the sake of all that is fair and just, we have to take into account the following:
Lagos emptied out in the days before the census, I was there, I saw it with my eyes. We must also accept that parts of Lagos weren't counted. A lot of people travelled to their 'home' states for the census. A colleague of mine told me point blank that he didn't want his people to suffer when resources were being shared.

We also must state that parts of Lagos are not actually in Lagos State. The 'Welcome to Lagos' sign board if you are driving in from the East or North is at Berger. Isheri, Igbafo, Ojodu, etcetera are actually in Ogun State.

We also have to acknowledge this fact: populations generally tend to congregate in any of the following kinds of places: places close to a large body of water; commercial centres; fertile lands. That logic should mean that it would be more likely to have a larger population in and around the Niger-Benue Basin, the Delta, the Lake Chad Basin, and the ancient commercial centre of Kano.

We also have to take into account the relative population densities. Looking at figures for face value can be misleading. The truth remains that at the end of the day, the states in the North are bigger in terms of geographical area than their counterparts in the South. What I would be more interested in is a table of population density, not just raw figures.

If for argument's sake both Lagos and Kano had identical population figures, but Kano had twice the land mass, how would anyone ever believe that Kano had such a high population? Impossible to accept, because the density would be half that of Lagos, and that's what people base their 'estimates' on. In such a scenario, for 'Kano' to match the population density of Lagos, it would have to further double its population, or Lagos would have to empty half of its own.

I myself have asked 'where are the people?' when visiting the North. I was expecting to see the 'crush' of humanity I was used to in Lagos and Ibadan and Onitsha. People generally do not take into account land mass when comparing population figures.


The story of Northern Nigeria and the myth of the cows

One of the prevalent myths circulating around in the minds of majority of southerners in Nigeria is that the North is all desert. That is wrong. There is no true desert zone in Nigeria. Granted there is a gradual 'desertification' especially in Katsina and Bornu. But apart from the rain forest in the South, we have three grades of savannah in the North. Remember Social Studies from JSS2? Again, population size is a different concept from population density. Size refers to total number of persons in a territory or region. Density relates to number of persons to an area. Specifically, density of population is the number of persons per square kilometre. The South is a smaller physical area – roughly a quarter of the country's land area – and is more densely populated than the North. The North - which accounts for the other three-quarters of the total land area - may have a larger population but far lower population density than the South. The concentration of people in a small area, such as Lagos State, because of visibility would as a result falsely suggest a very large population relative to the other less dense areas. Thus, simply because the South is more densely populated than the North does not guarantee that it should automatically have a larger population.

Case point the map below


Bangladesh has a far greater population density (985) than India (336), but India at 1.2 billion people, eclipses Bangladesh's 149 millions. You want an even greater shocker? Take a look at the global population density table, and see which countries have the highest population densities. Does this automatically translate to a higher population? Your guess is as good as mine, NO. Strangely enough, if you go further down the list, Russia (8.4) is the 209th in the league table of population density, but when you compare with the list of countries by raw population figures, they come in at number 8 (between Bangladesh and Nigeria). All this goes to show that you can travel miles without seeing anybody, but still have a lot of people in the yard...

Another myth that we like to perpetuate in the South is the myth that the rain forest is more habitable to human life than the (once again) desert. Well, first things first, we have shown that there is no desert in Naija, so let us look at this rain forest thing again critically...

A comparison of maps of the distribution of worlds population with that of vegetation reveals a most significant pattern: Universally, tropical rain forest areas, as found in southern Nigeria, are densely settled: it is an acknowledged fact that the most densely populated climate zones tend to be those of the savannah and the Mediterranean climates where there is a marked division into rainy and dry seasons. Except in certain areas where powerful cultures have evolved, most forests have been associated with low population densities, not only because of the thickness of vegetation and the difficulties of clearing but also of diminution of soil fertility after clearance and high incidence of diseases as well as limitations of human technology to tackle such environment. Michael Crichton in his book Congo described the African rain forest as “impenetrable, indestructible, and hostile in every way to human life. The soil can only support mere and infrequent harvests. Man is a marginal being, menaced and infested”. That is the main reason the Amazon forest of Brazil is sparsely populated. Countries in Africa that are entirely rain forest, Congo, Cameroon and Gabon for example have low population densities (24, 34 and 4.6). Or haven't you wondered why Congo Kinshasa with all that land mass has at least 30 million people less than Egypt? For your information, the bulk of the food produced in Nigeria, is not produced in the South, and agriculture has always been a major attraction for labour.

I can't argue against the story of people being attracted to water bodies because it is true. But what I'll do it to point out that the Niger's point of entry into Nigeria is in Kebbi State. There is the Benue, and there is Lake Chad. Not to mention quite a number of water bodies all over the North. For crying out loud, I have taken a swim in Gurara.


Sex ratio

The outcry about there being more males than females just goes to prove the point that Nigerian men are randy. What is the matter with us? How can you think of 4 women to a man? Even at the end of World War II when the Russians had a surplus of females, the ratio never hit 1.5 females to the male, not to talk of Nigeria where there has been relative peace for 37 years. I am lifting the following directly from Wikipedia:

The natural sex ratio at conception is estimated close to 1.05 males/female (this is related to the weight ratio of X to Y chromosomes). Due to the universally higher life expectancy of females, sex ratio tends to even out in adult population, and result in an excess of females among the elderly (e.g., the male to female ratio falls from 1.05 for the group aged 15 to 65 to 0.70 for the group over 65 in Germany, from 1.00 to 0.72 in the USA, from 1.06 to 0.91 in mainland China and from 1.07 to 1.02 in India).

Even in the absence of sex selection practices, a range of "normal" sex ratios at birth of between 103 to 107 boys per 100 girls has been observed in different societies, and among different ethnic and racial groups within a given society. Darwin, in his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, cites a sex ratio of 120 boys to 100 girls for Jewish communities in 19th century Livonia, where infanticide is not historically documented, and the means for pre-natal sex determination did not exist. Still, more extreme ratios documented in some populations should be attributed rather more to cultural preferences than to biological variation in the propensity to bear boys or girls.

In the United States, the sex ratios at birth over the period 1970-2002 were 105 for the white non-Hispanic population, 104 for Mexican Americans, 103 for African Americans and Indians, and 107 for mothers of Chinese or Filipino ethnicity.^[2] Among European countries ca. 2001, the ratios ranged between 104 in Belgium and 107 in Portugal. In the aggregated results of 56 Demographic and Health Surveys[1] in African countries, the ratio is 103, though there is also considerable country-to-country variation.^[3]

Need I say more on that?


Resource control

At the end of the day though, this whole hullabaloo is about one thing: oil revenues.

There is an excellent article about is on Grandiose Parlour, and I will lift some of the relevant points because I think Imnakoya is finally beginning to come to terms with what I have been saying for a long time now:

* The total population of Bayelsa state is 1,703,358; it’s the least populated in the nation.

* Bayelsa received 5,325,414,955.84 (Naira) in May 2004 from federal account (PDF document); the second highest in the nation. This works out to 3,126.42 Naira per citizen . The highest allocation-per-citizen ratio* in the country And this is just from federal account, the figure doesn’t include locally generated revenue.

Once again I would repeat my rant that the people in the Niger Delta have (at least in my opinion) made the transition from being victims to being perpetrators. What for example do Chinese telecom workers have to do with the Niger-Delta 'struggle'? Why can't they channel their anger to the people who are raping them? Will increasing the population of Rivers State (and as a result its Federal allocation) prevent Odili from carrying on? Do I need to say more on this Delta thing? Time will definitely prove me right.


Conclusion

Sadly this whole furore just goes to show one thing. Despite the attempts to remove the parts of previous questionnaires which 'put fuel in the fire', and despite the fact that at the end of the day, the census is what it was, a huge joke, our people are intent on seeking out ways to pursue their own selfish agendas. The same apathy that was shown during the conduct of the census in some parts has already manifested in the voters registration exercise. I foresee Nigeria developing along Indian lines, and it is not what I want, but it is what will happen. Let's make no mistakes, our country has too much potential to remain prostrate for much longer, but at the same time there is too much lethargy amongst the populace.

Nigerians are once again showing an unwillingness to look at other means of generating revenue. Everyone just wants to go to Abuja to partake in the 'national cake'. And that is a tragedy.