Nigeria’s population to hit 400m by 2050 -Report




Nigeria will be world’s fourth most populous country, with 400 million people – just less than the projected figure for the United States by 2050, the global Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has projected in its latest report.

This new projection came as demographers fear a crisis of poverty and social upheaval could offset gains of this population growth as a result of the government’s lack of proper planning for this surge.

“If we keep growing our population at this rate, without also growing our means to sustain it, we are heading towards catastrophe,” Owoeye Olumide, a demographer at Bowen University told Reuters.

“We have to do something very fast … or we face more poverty and agitation or worse – disease, hunger, war.”

Official figures say absolute poverty rose to 60 percent last year, from 54.7 percent in 2004, worsened by rapid population growth. Some 100 million Nigerians live in poverty.

“With that kind of pressure of population, the way Nigeria has worked … would be very difficult to repeat over the next 20 years without some big catastrophe happening,” said Anthony Goldman, head of Nigeria-focused PM Consulting.

Few investment funds share this view. Banks like Renaissance Capital believe African demographics will spur an economic transformation of the sort Asia has seen.

“Only sub-Saharan Africa is positioned to experience 15-20 percent growth in the crucial 15-24 age range over the coming decades, which will provide the plentiful labor force the world economy will rely on,” the bank said in a 2011 report entitled “The bottom billion becomes the fastest billion”.

This will provide huge opportunities for retailers and the auto industry, for which “demographic data alone suggest Africa will be overtaking China within two generations”.

Nigeria is already a big market for basic goods, like the soap, beer or flour.

While Africa’s most populous nation has long had business leaders salivating over its potentially huge market, especially retailers of fast-moving consumer goods, it is not clear whether it can turn a growing population – already at 170 million – into a richer society with widespread higher living standards.

The environment can’t keep pace with a population rising at 2.4 percent a year, according to U.N. figures.

They fear swelling numbers of jobless and uneducated youths threaten the stability of a country already suffering an Islamist uprising in the north and oil theft, piracy and kidnapping by criminal gangs in the south.

Nigeria is often used by promoters of an “Africa Rising” narrative urging investors to buy into the continent’s potential to reap a “demographic dividend” from an expanding population of young people of working age.



Yet countries that reap the “demographic dividend” usually do so only once population growth starts to slow.



While fertility rates are crashing across Asia and Latin America – mirroring falls in Europe a generation ago – in sub-Saharan Africa they remain high. A 2012 World Bank study put them at five children per woman; in Nigeria, it is 5.6.



The United Nations predicts sub-Saharan Africa’s population will double by 2045 to 2 billion. Nigeria will account for a fifth of that, and some fear city infrastructure, education and the job market won’t keep up.



“It’s like we’re running just to stand still,” said Ben Akabueze, the Lagos commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget.



“You roll out services, then so many more people arrive,” he says. “Sometimes we can’t quite cope.”



A Standard Bank study last year questioned Nigeria’s potential as a mass consumer market. It showed that in some of the urban centers seen as promising, like Lagos, household incomes are far below the threshold for a retail boom.



It found 93 percent of Lagos households were in the poorest category, with monthly income lower than $390, compared with only 38 percent in Johannesburg.



Only retailers targeting “the bottom of the pyramid”, like brewers or Swiss food group Nestle (NESN.VX), can tap such people, said Standard Bank’s head of equity product, Matthew Pearson.



“(Retailers) … down in South Africa were most surprised,” said Pearson. “Received wisdom was that the middle class in Nigeria was a lot bigger than it actually is.”



That suggests retailers like high-end South African supermarket Woolworths (WHLJ.J), which set up in Nigeria in 2011, face a small market for some time. Strategies targeting middle-income groups that worked in places like India and South Africa may not yet work so well for Nigeria, Pearson said.



The PRF says nearly half of Nigerians are under 15, and in the “Middlebelt” – a region of central Nigeria populated largely by minority ethnic groups – violence is common among youth gangs, with disputes over scarce land and water. Dozens have been killed in the past week in Plateau state.



In the Niger Delta, gangs of mostly unemployed armed youths steal tens of thousands of barrels of oil a day from pipelines.



And the biggest threat to Nigeria’s stability – the north’s Islamist insurgency – is driven by its desperate, unemployed youth population, said Mohammed Junaidu, a northern opposition politician and academic, adding that Nigeria had 12 million children of school age who were not in education.



“It’s a combination of failures of governance and the ticking demographic time-bomb,” he said. “They urgently need to pacify these youths or face more instability and terrorism.”



The government has for decades tried to curb population growth through family planning, but struggles to influence a poorly educated population, many living in remote rural areas, that values having many children, officials say.



“Nigeria needs an attitudinal change,” says John Adegbite, executive director of NGO the Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria, adding that only around 10 percent use contraceptives.



Yet those who take a bullish view of Nigeria’s economic future argue that its growth can still eventually lift large sections of society out of extreme poverty.



Charles Robertson at Renaissance Capital says over a third of children go to secondary school, compared with just 7 percent in 1975. That is now similar to India 20 years ago, he says.



He also thinks that, as Nigeria and Africa become more prosperous, populations will naturally rise more slowly.



“As African countries get richer, birth rates will drop dramatically,” he said – as has happened in India and Egypt. As a result, he says, U.N. projections for Nigeria’s population by 2050 will be “out by tens of millions”.



For demographers like Olumide, that is too complacent.



“Without a change of reproductive behavior, I can’t see how we can slow population growth,” he said. “We are just loading more people onto the table. Very soon, it’s going to collapse



Daily Independent