Recessions can last decades but the impact of unrestrained population growth lasts a lifetime!
With the prevailing negative and widely felt economic situation in Nigeria, a harmonized view on the topics of recession and population control seems relevant.
Growing up in Nigeria has offered me a firsthand opportunity of assessing rational and emotional reasons for family size preferences. With cases seemingly equally strong for family sizes siting at both ends of the population spectrum, discussions aimed at addressing this sensitive topic often boil down to battles of emotional preferences. Ranging from infant mortality statistics being an explanation for “insurance oriented” multiple births; a scenario where parents point to the possibility of losing kids as a justification for having more, to the lingering drive for male kids or intra-family gender balance, there is no shortage of excuses. As far flung and arguable as this may appear, I have encountered cases where reliance on well off relatives to help raise one’s kids is the proffered justification. One could go further into the long list of excuses for cases where large family sizes are needed for rural and farming families with labor as the justification for numbers. Well, I think these scenarios would suffice for now.
Which should rationally come first? The chicken or the egg? A rhetorical question for a conundrum might seem an unwise approach, but it helps open the door for opinions on this relevant topic; In the Nigerian case, would moral restraint come before industrialization, would it be the other way around or should we not expect either or both?
Let’s step away from family size arguments for a moment and dip a bit into the pool of knowledge from the 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, where Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated the “the demographic-economic paradox”, an inverse relationship between income and fertility. We can now step further back in time to the late 18th century for the groundbreaking work done by Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, an English cleric and scholar in his work on “the principle of population” where he laid out his logic for the “Malthusian trap”; a situation where a society’s standard of living is made unsustainable by population growth. He goes on to postulate that the fix for the trap resides in collective moral restraint, but this takes us back to the beginning since we learn from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that moral restraint is located at the top two layers of the pyramid; between esteem and self-actualization.
The questions and thoughts put forward here are not intended to suggest that the current Nigeria recession is a direct product of unchecked population as our excesses in spending and inefficiency in management are well known. Add stifling corruption to the weak structural planning, non-existent social welfare structure and the justification is almost sufficient for the current situation. The overriding driver is however the need for a deep, widespread reflection.
With the error margins in our national population estimates possibly out-sizing any of the bottom 55% of nations on the global population ranking, do we really need to keep ignoring the devil in the details? Would less not actually mean more at least at the family level? Should we keep waiting for change in our corrupt rulers and officials or can we at least make efforts to right-size at our family levels for now and the future?

Lol even if there is a law that says no nigerian should give birth to more Dan one child, there still will be occurrences of economic recession, corruption and their likes.