A country with increasing Population but no Resources

Posted by FN Editor | 4 years ago | 1,191 times



 

By Emenike Vincent Onyembi
contact: vemenyk@gmail.com

Does that sound strange to you? It should not. That is our current predicament in Nigeria. It keeps increasing almost every other day. No sound policy on population control. No endeavor to sustain the growing number of persons therein. We are trapped. Believe me. We are really trapped.

This should bother us all.

The beginning of this problem is poor utilisation of family planning. The damage has been done already. We can not provide school for all of them again. We can only mitigate the disaster of poorly educated child by focusing on massive job creation within informal sectors such as agriculture and co. Plus aggressive drive on family planning. We are already in a hole. We should just stop digging.

As at today, the entire country spend less than ₦73bn as capital funding on education from primary to University. Why not add ₦300bn to that. This can be pulled from the holes in the annual budget expenditure.

The problem might not really be about population, that is if we are to consider what China and India looks like, because if it were, then nations will not be looking for more people to come over. The flip side of the problem is that we are doing nothing. Absolutely nothing about anything.

If you do not educate your people, they will not even know anything about family planning until nature takes its toll. The more we are, the more cheaper it is to manage and the more gains we can create. But that is if we have capacity.
People need capacity.

Aside that, the incremental failure in government making the right decisions and investments in education, healthcare and other socioeconomic factors connected to improving the living standards of Nigerians is even worrisome. That failure stretches over 30 years now and rather than make concerted efforts to address them we keep on postponing the evil day by looking for silver bullet solutions and magic wands that can be waved and all the problems disappear.

Increased child birth rate in any society is a direct consequence of high level of poverty and illiteracy.

Population without purpose, is the true test of our country. And those who should know better, encourage it. They are the ones who deliver 1.9 million votes for APC primaries, deliver 2.9 million votes for presidential elections and 4 thousand for school certificate examinations.

From statistics, majority of the out of school kids are in the North West and North East. Culture and religion is also a major factor here too. As an educationist, a country which fails to fix its primary education sector is destined for abyss. That is the foundation. You can not build without foundation.

Yes, we are building our castle from the top without foundation. Now you see why China will ‘colonise’ Nigeria in future? Our government keep borrowing money to build obsolete infrastructure. Who is going to maintain it, who is going to pay the money back? Uneducated future generation?

Good we know the number of children out of school, what is the quality of education that the ones in schools are receiving? What is the number of those receiving low quality of education? Just like artisans from neighbouring countries are taking over our craft work sector, very soon we will be relying on clerical and administrative man power from those countries, the Asians will dominate management.

We are headed nowhere. The facts are clear.

 


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