Keywords: Nigeria, Tropical Africa, demography, birth rate, "population explosion"

Nigeria, like many other countries in Tropical Africa that continue to have a high birth rate (unlike other countries and regions in the developing world), is currently experiencing a "population explosion", i.e. extremely rapid population growth. The country faces the problem of regulating demographic growth.

Since 1960, the population of Nigeria has grown 4 times: it doubled from 45,2 million in 1960 to 90.8 million in 1988, and then doubled again to 177,4 million in 2014.1 This rapid population growth is a consequence of the decline in mortality and the continuing extremely high birth rate of 5.5 children per woman in 2013.2 What factors led to such a high birth rate?

POPULATION GROWTH MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS

The first demographic development strategy in Nigeria, aimed at reducing the birth rate, was adopted under President I. Babangida in 1988, largely due to the efforts of Professor O. Ransom-Kuti, who served as Minister of Health. Ransom-Kuti sought to implement cutting-edge approaches to addressing Nigerian health and demographic policy issues and recognized the risks associated with maintaining the country's traditionally high birth rate. ³

The strategy set an important goal: to reduce the birth rate from 6 to ⁴ children per woman by 2000, and the population growth rate from 3.3 to 2% per year4. The program received the support of the head of state: General Babangida publicly stated that "four children are enough"⁵.

However, the demographic development strategy of 1988 and its objectives were met with strong resistance in a wide variety of groups in Nigerian society. Women's rights activists felt that the strategy was discriminatory, since the birth rate takes into account the number of children per woman, not per family. Although this is exactly the standard practice adopted in demographic statistics around the world.

Representatives of the Muslim community stated that the regulation of childbearing and the desired number of children should be decided within the family and cannot be brought before the general public.⁶

Even the "conspiracy" view found some support, since the birth reduction program was actively supported by donors of international development assistance - it was seen as part of a "conspiracy" aimed at reducing the size of the Nigerian population and weakening ^the country7.

At the household level, support for a high birth rate is widespread, but for slightly different reasons. The population of Nigeria is characterized by the following factors of high birth rate:

- the desire to have a large family;

- Nigeria has a historically high birth rate combined with a high level of female employment8.

Attitudes to maintaining a high birth rate are particularly pronounced in the north of the country, where the predominantly Muslim population lives. The birth rate, according to Medical and Demographic Studies* 2013, was 6.7 children per woman in the north-west of the country and 6.3 in the north-east. For comparison, in the southern regions of Nigeria, these values ranged from 4.3 to 4.7 children per woman. At the same time, the average Nigerian rate was 5.5 children per woman.

In terms of the birth rate, there is still a significant differentiation between urban and rural areas -4.7 and 6.2 children per woman, respectively ⁹. Only 10% of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 use modern contraceptives-

The study was carried out as part of the HSE's Basic Research program in 2016.

* The Demographic and Health Surveys series was launched by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1984. More than 260 studies were conducted in more than 90 developing countries around the world. These are nationally and regionally representative household surveys with a sample of 5,000 to 30,000 households, conducted at approximately 5-year intervals.

In rural areas, this figure is only 5.7%. Traditional or modern contraceptives are much more commonly used in the southern regions (30 to 40% of married women use them there) than in the north, where in some areas this figure is close to zero - 3.2% in the north - east and 4.3% in the north - west10.

In northern Nigeria, too, the prevalence of early marriage remains extremely high by world standards. In 2003, Nigeria adopted the Children's Rights Act as part of its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to the law, the country's Constitution was amended to establish a universal minimum age for marriage-18 years. However, only about half of the Nigerian states have passed this law. In the rest (especially in the north of the country), early marriages are still very common11.

The importance of children is especially high in the male population. Men often want to have more children than women. This leads to the fact that the real number of children born to a woman sometimes exceeds the desired number of children. This is especially true for polygynous families (i.e., families where the husband has several wives) in northern Nigeria.

The most common motivations for such fertile behavior are::

- fear of divorce. The reason for it may be that the spouse is not able to give birth to the number of children her husband wants. At the same time, the more children a wife and husband have together, the more difficult it is for the husband to divorce this wife, since in a divorce all children remain in the care of the husband;

- the desire to prevent the husband from marrying another woman;

- the desire to strengthen their influence in the family (especially in comparison with other wives)¹².

Thus, the population of Nigeria was largely opposed to the spread of family planning practices and the ideas of birth control in general. State demographic policy in Nigeria faced even more serious challenges in the 1990s. At this time, due to the difficult political situation, the problem of reducing the birth rate almost completely lost its importance in the eyes of the Nigerian authorities. In addition, international development assistance to Nigeria has been significantly reduced, especially in terms of demographic issues and the spread of family planning practices. In the mid-1990s, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) temporarily ceased operations in Nigeria. The World Bank has shut down its Nigerian population program.

Thus, reducing the birth rate did not remain a priority of Nigerian domestic policy for long. Nigeria's birth rate remains one of the highest in the world. This is a consequence of the lack of a large-scale and systematic state campaign to disseminate ideas about the need to reduce the birth rate among the population, as well as powerful attitudes to maintaining a high birth rate that prevail in Nigerian society.

WHAT IS THE DEMOGRAPHIC FUTURE OF NIGERIA?

According to the UN average forecast, Nigeria's population will reach 400 million by 2050 and 750 million by 2100. ¹³

However, the forecasts developed by the UN Population Division, despite their many undoubted advantages, have a number of serious limitations. These limitations are due to the forecast methodology, which does not sufficiently take into account the impact of demographic factors on the socio-economic development prospects of African countries.

The most significant limitation is that a universal set of scenarios is calculated for any country that does not take into account the specifics of the demographic history of a particular country (for example, a prolonged period of "freezing" of the birth rate at a high level or the introduction of an effective state family planning program).

The forecast scenarios modeled in this way do not provide answers to the practical questions necessary for making decisions in the field of demographic development and in various related areas of socio-economic development. For example, to answer the following questions::

- what will be the population size of Nigeria in 15 (20, 30, 40) years if the birth rate starts to decline immediately at an accelerated rate?

- what will be the population size if the birth rate remains at the current level for another 5 (10, 15) years?

- How much will population growth decrease if Nigeria achieves the same rate of decline in fertility as Iran (which experienced the fastest decline in fertility in the world from the second half of the 1980s to the second half of the 1990s) or Rwanda (which achieved a comparable rate of decline in fertility in the second half of the 2000s)?¹⁴

To correctly assess the impact of demographic factors on the development of Nigeria in the short, medium and long term, forecasting the dynamics of the number of individual age groups, and not just the population as a whole, is also of great importance. For example, information about how much the number of school - age children will increase in the next 10 to 15 years is key to understanding how many new places in the school system the state will need to create annually in order to increase the number of school-age children in the next 10 to 15 years.-

Table 1

Absolute population of Nigeria, according to various forecast scenarios, up to 2100 (million people)

The author's calculations are based on the source data of the UN Population Division and US AID.

keep at least the current level of primary and secondary education coverage. At the same time, such growth is largely inevitable, since most of the representatives of this demographic group have already been born.

It is extremely important to have a fairly accurate forecast of the number of young people, the working-age population, and the ratio of the working-age and disabled population. For example, it is important to know the number of people of disabled age (young children and elderly people) per person of working age (in demography, this indicator is referred to by the stable term "demographic load factor"). However, the UN forecast scenarios, although they provide calculations of the number of five-year-old age and gender groups, do not allow us to get answers to these questions due to the above-mentioned features of the calculation methodology.

Taking into account the methodological limitations of the applicability of UN forecasts, we developed our own method of scenario forecasting of the population size. The methodology was applied to predict likely scenarios for the demographic future of Nigeria.

SCENARIO FORECASTING OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC FUTURE OF NIGERIA

To calculate the author's demographic forecasts, we used the UN Population Division's baseline data on the current gender and age structure of the population of Nigeria ¹⁵ and current mortality rates ¹⁶, as well as data from the US Agency for International Development on fertility rates ¹⁷ among Nigerian women of various ages.

Then, the conditions for calculating each scenario were determined. First of all, we drew attention to the fact that over the past 15 years, the birth rate in Nigeria has practically not decreased, despite the rather dynamic development of the country during this period18.

Accordingly, the first scenario was calculated for the following conditions: what will be the population size of Nigeria by 2050, if the birth rate remains at the current level for another 15 years, and then begins to decline at a relatively slow rate (0.1 children per woman per year).

After that, we took into account the fact that a number of

Figure 1. Projected scenarios of population dynamics in Nigeria up to 2050, pers.

The author's calculations are based on the source data of the UN Population Division and USAID. The black line is the forecast dynamics of the population in the scenario of further stagnation of the birth rate, the gray line is in the "Iranian" scenario.

Table 2

Absolute number of selected age groups in the population structure of Nigeria by 2050, million people, according to forecast scenarios

The author's calculations are based on the source data of the UN Population Division and USAID.

Countries around the world - most notably Iran and Rwanda - have been able to achieve a significant acceleration in the decline in the birth rate thanks to effective government policies in this area. In Iran, in particular, the birth rate declined at a record pace for the developing world, from 6.22 per woman in 1985 to 1.83 in 2005, or about 1.1 children per woman in 5 years.¹⁹

Accordingly, the second scenario for Nigeria was calculated for the following conditions: what will be the population size of this country by 2050, if the Nigerian government introduces an effective family planning program and can achieve the same rate of decline in the birth rate as in Iran.

The results of the calculations - the projected population of Nigeria in 2050 under both scenarios-are presented in Table. 1 and on diagr. 1.

The projected absolute population growth in Nigeria is the largest of any country in Tropical Africa, as Nigeria has the largest population in the region and the largest lag in declining fertility. The difference between the "Iranian" scenario and the scenario of further stagnation of the birth rate for Nigeria is enormous: 290.4 against 450.1 million people by 2050.

It is obvious that the inertial scenario, which is very likely to be implemented in the absence of a targeted state demographic policy, is fraught with extremely serious demographic risks not only for Nigeria itself, but also for the states bordering it.

Currently (2010 data) only 63% of children of the corresponding age attend primary school. A further delay in the decline in the birth rate will mean that the number of school-age children in Nigeria will increase by more than 2.5 times by 2050, which may lead to the collapse of the educational infrastructure or a catastrophic drop in educational enrollment (see Table 2).

The scenario of continuing "freezing" of the birth rate also implies a more than threefold increase in the number of young people aged 15-24 years. This factor will have a powerful destabilizing potential for the socio-political situation not only in Nigeria itself, but, possibly, in neighboring countries and in the West African region as a whole.

* * *

In Tropical Africa in general, and in Nigeria in particular, there is no strong evidence that economic achievements (at least,

measured by improvements in macroeconomic indicators) can lead to a noticeable acceleration of the decline in the birth rate.

The birth rate has remained constant or even increased in Nigeria during the years (in the 2000s) when oil prices were extremely high. Consequently, the expectation that further development will inevitably "automatically" trigger a decline in the birth rate and bring it to the level of modern countries is a very dubious basis for building both an international development assistance strategy and a domestic policy of the countries of the region.

¹ World Bank. World Development Indicators, 2015 -http://data.worldbank.org/indicator

² MEASURE DHS STAT Compiler. ICF International, 2012 - http://www.statcompiler.com/

^{Robinson R.S.} 3 Negotiating Development Prescriptions: The Case of Population Policy in Nigeria // Population Research and Policy Review. 2012. Vol. 31, N 2, p. 267 - 296.

⁴ National policy on population for development, unity, progress, and self-reliance. Lagos: Federal Ministry of Health/Department of Population Activities, 1988, p. 14.

^{Avong H.N.} 5 Perception of and attitudes toward the Nigerian federal population policy, family planning program and family planning in Kaduna State, Nigeria // African Journal of Reproductive Health / La Revue Africaine de la Santer Reproductive. 2000. Vol. 4, N 1, p. 66 - 76.

^{Robinson R.S.} 6 Op. cit.

^{Izugbara Ch.O., Ezeh A.C.} 7 Women and High Fertility in Islamic Northern Nigeria // Studies in Family Planning. 2010. Vol. 41, N 3, p. 193 - 204.

^{Zinkina Yu. V.} 8 "Pronatalist" culture of Tropical Africa: the relationship between high birth rate and traditional management system // Vostok / Oriens. 2015. N 3. pp. 92-99. (Zinkina Yu. V. 2015. "Pronatalistskaya" kultura Tropicheskoy Afriki... // Vostok / Oriens. N 3) (in Russian)

⁹ The birth rate in Nigeria was 5.7 children per woman in 2003, the same number in 2008 and 5.5 in 2013. See: MEASURE DHS STAT Compiler...

¹⁰ Ibid.

^{11. Zinkina Yu. V.} 11 Tropical Africa: marriage age and birth rate / / Asia and Africa today. 2014. N 4. С. 39 - 45. (Zinkina Yu.V. 2014. Tropicheskaya Afrika: brachnyi vozrast i rozhdaemost // Aziya i Afrika segodnya. N 4) (in Russian)

^{Izugbara Ch.O., Ezeh A.C.} 12 Op. cit.; Duze M.C., Mohammed I.Z. 2006. Male knowledge, attitudes, and family planning practices in northern Nigeria // African Journal of Reproductive Health. 2006. Vol. 10, N 3, p. 53 - 65.

¹³ UN Population Division. 2012. United Nations. Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division Database. World Population Prospects -http://www.un.org/esa/population

^{14. Zinkina Yu. V.} Demographic explosion: the "unfashionable" development issue of Tropical Africa and the success of Rwanda / / Asia and Africa Today. 2015, N 12. (Zinkina Yu.V. 2015. Demograficheskiy vzryv: "nemodnyi" vopros razvitiya Tropicheskoy Afriki i uspekhi Ruandy // Aziya i Afrika segodnya. N 12) (in Russian)

¹⁵ UN Population Division. 2012...

¹⁶ Ibidem.

¹⁷ MEASURE DHS STAT Compiler...

¹⁸ Ibidem.

¹⁹ World Bank...

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