Poorer Power to the People: Nigeria’s Politics of Population, Presumption and Privation (1)
As the economic fortunes and living standards of Nigerians decline by the day, with 133 of their country’s 211 million population poor, many are forced to leave the country.
However, this 63% of Nigerians cannot afford the funds they need to escape the austere conditions in the country.
Thus, the poorest Nigerians flee the epicentres of poverty in the country to other parts, usually from the rural to the urban areas and from the northern to the southern parts of the country, where poverty is less endemic.
In light of this, something needs to be done to the poverty situation in the northern part of the country. Otherwise, Nigeria may need to brace itself for a caravan of poor and deprived people from the north to the south of the country, like the exodus from Central America to the north of the continent.
For instance, in Sokoto State, Northwest Nigeria, with a population of 6.42 million, 9 in every 10 people are poor. This contrasts sharply with Ondo State, Southwest Nigeria, where 7 in every 10 people you see are not poor.
That journey southwards would likely begin from 3 of the Northwest States, namely, Kano, Katsina, and Kaduna States, or the KKK states. The three states are home to the largest population of poor people in the country.
The poor people in Kano could fill up the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Niger state, and Nassarawa state, the 2 states sharing the longest borders with the federal Territory.
The poor people in Kaduna state could fill up the entire Federal Capital Territory (FCT) and Kogi State, a state which shares the smallest border with the federal territory after Kaduna, Nassarawa, and Niger State.
The poor people in Katsina State would need 98% of the present population of Rivers State to leave before the state would contain them.
The population of poor people in the KKK states exceeds the population of the whole of southeastern Nigeria.
The poor people in the KKK states would fill up Lagos, Ogun, and Osun States, and there still wouldn't be enough space to contain them, even if the current residents all left.
The poor people in the KKK states would fill up the entire 6 South-south states except one, Rivers state.
The Politics of Population
When faced with the unpleasant outcomes of monetary and multidimensional poverty, as is the case in Nigeria, responsible governments deploy ‘the politics of population’ to pilot their people, away from the circumstances and consequences of poverty, towards global enviable income levels.
However, in Nigeria, the politics of population has an unfortunate variant.
In its progressive form, the politics of population describes the capacity of a government to deploy population control as a tool for socioeconomic development. Countries like China, Japan, and India have demonstrated this politics in recent decades for the emancipation of their people.
These three countries, for instance, trod the path of developed countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany, who have mastered the control of population increases and decreases to build efficient economies and stable societies.
The variant is one where the elite deceives the populace that the more their numbers, the more their welfare. Sectional elites deploy these awkward politics to perpetuate their camps in power, regardless of the fate of the people.
As this correspondence from 1964 shows, Nigerian politicians and people appear to have since embraced the variant form:
The first point made is that the outsized population of Nigeria has a diminishing worth because the population is growing above current economic and social planning. This is expected to be a major concern to the country’s leadership.
Instead, Nigeria’s sectional leaders opted for politics that incited the people towards an unbridled population explosion. When this does not suffice, they inflate population figures for their sectional elitist interests, as … correspondence further shows:
In “The Politics of Population Census: Challenge to Democracy and Nation Building in Nigeria since 1960”, Chinedu Mbalisi et al. remarked that:
“Nation building relies on good planning. Good planning on the other hand, is based on reliable, accurate and detailed information on the state of the society. This information makes it possible to plan better social services, improve the quality of life of people and solve existing societal problems such as unemployment, inequality, poverty, insecurity, sanitation and diseases.”
But the Nigerian political elite would not have any of this admonition. They lead their mostly undiscerning people to falsify census records and inflate their family sizes, presumptuously to receive more state representations at the federal legislature and more allocations of state resources.
Yet, they only transmit enumeration fraud into electoral fraud, further into executive fraud, onward to economic fraud, and finally to an existential fraud that situates the people in an unending cycle of false hopes and true hardship.
The problem with these poverty estimations, especially the poverty headcount rate or poverty incidence, is that it is based on the actual population of each state. Sadly, for 40 years, Nigeria has never achieved a factual count of its population, either by region or by state.
When it is difficult to measure the incidence of poverty, it is impossible to mitigate it, or map out an effective plan towards public prosperity.
This inability to appropriately measure demographic issues cuts across other development estimates because all the past censuses were reported to be fraught with fraud and the baseline population in doubt.
When basic demographic statistics such as these are politicised, the measurement of the people’s needs becomes inaccurate, and well-meaning policy initiatives meant to mitigate these privations become ineffective, as is obvious in Nigeria over the years.
The Popular Presumption
It is self-evident that there is power in numbers. But what kind of power?
Nigeria’s high population and high poverty show that a people’s number can be their undoing, depending on the educational and occupational quality of the people who make up that number.
While population figures are inflated to secure more seats in the federal legislature, there is no statistical proof that the number of federal representatives that a state has reduces or increases the multidimensional poverty of the people in the state.
While there is significant demographic parity between Lagos and Kano States, Oyo and Kaduna States, or Rivers and Katsina states, the developmental disparity among these pairs are obvious.
This shows that the quality of legislative representation for a state matters to the people rather than the quantity of representatives they have. Thus, inflating census figures in order to obtain more constituencies and representatives only does the politicians good, and not the people.
The presumptuous power of numbers describes a people who continue to reproduce, rear and rely on an uneducated, miseducated, obsolete, aimless mass population to win votes and perpetuate their political clout.
The result is “power to the people”, but a power that impoverishes and dehumanises that same electorate that made that power to be.
Clearly, the poorest countries are not the least populous countries. But the more presumptuous a people are about their population, the poorer the population.