Our increasing population keeps me awake at night – Obasanjo

Former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, on Tuesday, said Africa’s ever-increasing population keeps him awake at night.

The former president said this at the public presentation of the maiden edition of the Africa Progress Group (APG) report in Lagos.

Obasanjo, who is the chairman of the APG, said if Africa’s growing population is managed properly, it would yield huge dividends for national and regional development.

His words: “Over the last several years, as I travelled through cities and rural communities in Africa, my heart sinks with the sea of heads that fleet across my eyes in parks, marketplaces and under bridges.

“Even today as I flew over some settlements from Minna to Lagos and traversed the road from Ikeja to Victoria Island, the sheer number of persons literally oozing out from nowhere kept my mind numb and exasperated. By the year, the situation has been worsening and has filled me with a sense of foreboding.

“Three clusters of questions pop up in my mind any time the scary thoughts of the ever-increasing population keep me awake at night. The first cluster is: how are we going to feed this exploding population? Only a few days ago, the alarm was raised about imminent food crisis in Nigeria.

“Similar alarm bells have been ringing with increasing stridency all over Africa. How are we going to house them; educate them, provide them with health security and other variants of human security?

The second cluster of questions, according to the former president, is how to keep the keg of gunpowder of the large army of unemployed youth from exploding.

“How do we keep them from enlisting in violent extremists’ groups and in gangs of kidnappers? The third cluster of questions is: how can Africa attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2063 in a turbulent sea of exploding, not-well-managed populations?”

“While these clusters of questions are frightening, they would appear to have an elegantly simple solution — political will and action to make population an asset. This is the master key of a sort! I am sure you noticed that this ‘key’ has two elements — the will and the action.

“Youth unemployment rate in Africa is one of the highest in the world. African countries must urgently commit to lowering this rate through a combination of efforts including functional education, entrepreneurial training, and provision of job opportunities and the enabling environment for investment and growth of small and medium-scale enterprises.

“The attention paid to education by a country is, in large part, a reflection of its responsiveness to making its growing population an asset. Education is seen as the antidote to poverty and ignorance and the direct and indirect key to unlocking human and material resources of a nation. It can be likened to the hub around which other components of development revolve, like spokes on a wheel.”

Obasanjo said it was not enough to shroud political will in mere political rhetoric and sloganeering but translating such will into concrete, measurable actions with a visible impact on the ground.

“This is why, in this report, APG, being a group with a burning desire for Africa’s progress has established a unique measure of progress of African countries on the concrete and measurable actions on responsiveness to their growing populations.”

The report, Population As Asset Responsiveness Index (PARI), is anticipated to be a stimulus for African countries to show more responsiveness to making their populations more of an asset than a burden, according to the former president.

He added that it would be an annual measure computed from credible, published, and verifiable secondary data obtained from primary data of UN agencies on the indicators of interest including education, health, food security, housing, energy, transportation, and employment.

“The 2020 ranking should be seen as a wake-up call by African countries and a basis for strategically planning for improvement in the coming years rather than a basis for dejection by low-ranked countries or complacency by the high-ranked.

“Human capital development is the main key for making the population an asset. The development partners and private sector can support by harnessing a demographic divide by building capacity for policy implementation into actionable intervention with clear indicators of progress to enable tracking and foster accountability,” Obasanjo added.