Image is mine
First of all, let us establish the fact that the burden of birth control is being placed on the wrong gender. Hence, population control becomes quiet difficult and ineffective.
It should be worthy to note that the woman with the highest number of children in the world, Valentina Vassilyeva has 69 children from multiple birth with one man.
Whereas, the man with the highest number of children in history, Genghis Khan, has 3000 children from multiple women.
Now these brings us to some very pertinent questions which are, "why do we run around in circles altering the menstraul cycle and hormones of women with contraceptives instead of us to be hitting the nail on the head by embracing vasectomy?"
Again, it is evident that the Nigerian government has failed woefully in combating over population and this is because they keep adopting the wrong policies.
Let us take a trip down memory lane shall we? Ok lets go.
During my second degree, in developmental Economics we were being taught population control in Nigeria. My professor made reference to the One child policy adopted in China which to some extent is believed to have curbed down the spiral effect of their population growth.
There was a time in Nigeria, during the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida that similar policy was adopted, but it was four children to a couple not one.
It should be worthy to note that, thiscpolicy did not see the light of day and the professor taking us on developmental economics felt such policy should be reintroduced and followed strictly.
So I asked him, "sir, when you say four children per couple, did you take into consideration polygamous families especially in Northern Nigeria where the men are entitled religion and culture wise to take as much wives as they please?"
I continued, "lets say four children per couple which is a man and a wife right? now in case of polygamy, does that not leave the man with each of his four wives having sixteen children in total?"
The professor kept quiet as well as everyone else who was busy pondering on what I just said. The next thing the professor said was, you see why policies fail especially in Nigeria? The sabotage is just too much.
In my final response to him, I politely told him that a good policy is sabotage proof.
There is a saying that what is worth doing, is worth doing well. We have three options to a sustainable economy and these three options can only be implemented by the government since they are the highest authorities on planet earth.
First Option is switching the method of birth control from contraceptive to vasectomy because the latter has been known to be safer than the contraceptive women are being pumped with.
It also has no side effect nor cause any potential damage to the male libido or terosterone. Unlike what contraceptives do to us women.
Option number two is for women. For the female part, we do not need to be pumped with pills, rather what we need is enlightenment of our parents especially from manipulative religious doctrines like the early child marriage and the domestication of women subjecting them to house keepers and nannies.
Once a woman becomes career ambitious, her urge for procreation drops. Why? because multiple children becomes detrimental to her career.
While the woman is getting pregnant and nursing, the career world is basically leaving her behind and setting her backward from her peers.
If she doesn't want to do parenting haphazardly, she'll be forced to have very few children she can comfortably sacrifice some years of her career for. Years of which when she gets back on track, she'll be able to catch up with her peers.
Furthermore, the resulting effect of grooming the girl child to be career ambitious in a bid to curb down population growth will hold water if option number one is strictly adhered to.
That way, as the woman stop birthing and pursues her career, we are sure her husband is not somewhere sabotaging the policy by getting other women pregnant.
This brings us to option number three and this is for the government. Our Nigerian government are monetarist, who believes more in saving than spending and whenever they choose to pump money into the economy, its effect is trivia.
Rather than spend massively on capital projects to increase employment and boost produtivity, they would rather give out loans to the masses with high level/rate of unemployment, poverty, dependency and famine.
How they expect these classes of people to have repayment plans or invest the loans/grants wisely has to be juju because na who chop belleful dey do investment.
The thing with Nigerian government is that, they always focus more on the growth policies than the developmental policies and this is exactly why the spiral increment of the Nigeria population is detrimental and does not reflect on the developmental strength of the economy.
China is able to manage their over population by investing massively on human capital. In our case, the government is not concerned with our well being that's why in hospitals and schools, personnel to patient or student ratio is very low.
While we scream unemployment, the ministry and other business entities/organization has their work force over stretched.
Instead, we are left to battle with unproductive workforce, over bloated civil service and public assets lying in rot and ruins
From this angle, population is not the problem but lack of management and effective allocation of resources because our government cannot effectively manage the affairs of the economy to absorb our population growth.