‘The Case Against Helping the Poor’
Olusegun Adeniyi
Perhaps accepting that, at 80, the 2027 general election may be his last bid for Aso Rock, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is throwing everything—including the kitchen sink—at the incumbent President Bola Tinubu. The expression is familiar in football: a team, desperate for an equaliser or winning goal, commits every available player to the attack. From retaining lawyers in the United States to investigate Tinubu, to pursuing cases in Abuja seeking his disqualification, and granting interviews in which he portrays his former friend and associate as being as old as Methuselah, Atiku has injected new energy into a contest that, given the opposition’s divisions, was beginning to resemble a coronation. So far, however, only one of Atiku’s blows appears to have landed decisively: his criticism of the administration’s handling of fuel subsidy—and it is a heavy one.
Whatever one may think of Atiku’s policy alternatives—and I intend, at another time, to examine his curious mixture of upstream, downstream, production and fuel subsidy proposition—the Tinubu administration has serious questions to answer. Why have the removal of fuel subsidy and unification of the naira exchange rate made life considerably harder for ordinary Nigerians while foreign borrowing has continued to rise? Those of us with no dog in this fight can only reach for our popcorn and a chilled bottle of Coke—no other drink will do—and watch the drama unfold. But now that the poor have entered the campaign conversation, with Atiku presenting their welfare as the motivation for his positions on fuel subsidy, student loans and border control, it is worth examining one of the forces that continues to deepen poverty in Nigeria.
With an annual growth rate of 2.6 percent, Nigeria’s population is expanding faster than its resources and productive capacity. The country also records one of the highest annual population increases in the world. More troubling is the persistence of cultural values and belief systems that encourage people to have children for whom neither their families nor society has made adequate provision. This demographic time bomb demands serious attention, especially during a campaign season in which politicians have suddenly remembered the welfare of poor Nigerians.
In recent years, I have written several columns and engaged many people on Nigeria’s population challenge. My most recent exchange was with the Director-General of the Budget Office of the Federation, Mr Tanimu Yakubu. The discussion began on the ‘PUMY Collective’, a chat group comprising former principal aides, associates and immediate family members of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, including the former First Lady, Hajiya Turai. The forum is primarily social—we recently visited Ambassador Habu Habib and Mr Matt Aikhionbare, who lost their adult sons barely a week apart—but it also provides an occasional space for reflecting on the values and ideas associated with our late principal. During one such discussion earlier this year, Yakubu, who served as Chief Economic Adviser to President Yar’Adua, shared a paper on population. He and I subsequently continued the conversation outside the forum.
I had intended to address the subject in July, during the World Population Day 2026, whose theme was “Realizing the hopes and aspirations of young people—today and for the future.” But, as so often happens in Nigeria, the idea was overtaken by more immediate events. Now that the campaign season is upon us and every presidential candidate professes concern for the poor, Yakubu’s argument deserves renewed attention. His paper, titled ‘Demography, Destiny and Disorder: A Malthusian-Ricardian Reply to Nigeria’s Population Question’, begins with what he describes as a striking demographic contrast. “At independence in 1960, Nigeria’s population was 45,053,782, while the United Kingdom’s population was 52,400,000. By 2024, Nigeria had risen to 232,679,478, while the United Kingdom stood at 69,226,000,” Yakubu wrote. “That comparison captures the scale of Nigeria’s demographic rupture: not merely population growth, but population growth without a sufficiently rapid transformation of productivity, cities, skills, farms, health systems, policing and formal employment.”
While population, according to Yakubu, can show the scale of the burden or opportunity, it is the GDP per capita that reveals the extent to which that population is converted into economic value. “In 1960, Nigeria’s GDP per capita was US$93.14, compared with US$1,397.59 for the United Kingdom. By 2024, Nigeria stood at US$1,084.16, while the United Kingdom stood at US$53,246.37,” he wrote to explain our dilemma. “In relative terms, the United Kingdom moved from about 15 times Nigeria’s income per head in 1960 to about 49 times in 2024. This is the deeper economic warning: the divergence is not merely between population counts, but between population pressure and productivity per person.”
Yakubu, of course, is not against our growing numbers. “Population is power when it is educated, healthy, skilled, productively employed, spatially planned and institutionally governed. But population becomes pressure when it outruns food, jobs, schools, clinics, housing, policing, land administration and the moral imagination of the state.” Since that happens to be where we are today as a country, Yakubu enjoins us to heed Malthus’ warning that “when population expands faster than the productive base, nature and society begin to impose brutal corrections: hunger, disease, violence, migration, crowding, criminality and social breakdown.” Those ‘corrections’ are now evident, and Yakubu highlights them: “Violence has entered the economics of food. Abductions for ransom have become a tax on movement, farming, schooling and trade. The result is a harsh Malthusian-Ricardian fusion: mouths multiply, productive land retreats, and insecurity begins to determine what the nation eats.”
Drawing on the experiences of China, India and other countries that have confronted similar pressures, Yakubu’s paper is not merely a lament; it also offers prescriptions. He places girls’ education, maternal health, child survival, reproductive-health information, and women’s economic agency at the centre of development policy. He also advocates an agricultural revolution, anticipatory urban planning, formalisation of the informal economy, recovery of the forests, and the urgent pursuit of labour-intensive industrialisation. “Nigeria must manage demography as seriously as it manages debt, oil, inflation and exchange rates. Population is the largest macroeconomic variable in the country, yet too often it is treated as a census quarrel or a donor subject.”, he concluded while making other suggestions.
However, as insightful as Yakubu’s paper is, it does not fully confront the relationship between poverty, parental responsibility and the circumstances into which many Nigerian children are born. Although the subject requires more rigorous empirical study, the children most likely to be out of school, inadequately cared for or left to survive on the streets generally come from severely disadvantaged households. By contrast, educated and relatively comfortable families increasingly limit family size to the number of children they believe they can support. Indeed, the cost of raising children partly explains why migration (the ‘Japa Syndrome’) has become such an important consideration for upwardly mobile young Nigerian families.
This should not be misconstrued as an argument for poor people to be denied their reproductive rights. As the son of a village carpenter, I appreciate Zina Jayne’s observation that humanity has been immeasurably enriched by people born to low-income parents—presidents, athletes, writers, inventors, musicians and business leaders among them. The essential issue is responsibility, not social class. Our parents may have been poor, but they understood the value of education and made extraordinary sacrifices to secure it for their children. Many also practised family planning, including through traditional methods. That sense of obligation to the future of every child appears absent in today’s Nigeria.
There is an ominous warning in a 2009 report that Nigerian authorities never paid attention to and which I have referenced here several times. Titled, ‘Nigeria-The Next Generation,’ and coordinated by David Bloom, Harvard Professor of Economics and Demography, the report predicted that by 2030 Nigeria would be one of the few countries in the world with an abundance of young people at a period most others would be left with aging populations. “Nigeria is at a crossroads: one path offers a huge demographic dividend, with tremendous opportunity for widespread economic and human progress, while the other path leaves Nigeria descending into quicksand.” With the right policies, the report concluded, Nigeria could easily become one of the world’s leading economies; and with wrong choices, our young citizens would “become an increasingly disruptive force”.
We are already experiencing the consequences, notwithstanding the warnings of a few traditional rulers who recognised the danger early. In September 2019, the Emir of Anka in Zamfara State, Alhaji Attahiru Ahmed, cautioned low-income earners against marrying more wives than they could support. Two years earlier, the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II, had advanced a similar argument, only to be attacked by those who invoked religion to excuse parental irresponsibility. Sanusi’s point was straightforward: men unable to maintain one household but who marry several wives often have more children than they can adequately support, transferring the consequences of their choices to the children and society.
In my interventions on the immigration policies of some Western countries, I have often referred to Garrett Hardin’s controversial 1974 essay, ‘Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor’, to explain the underlying dilemma. At the centre of Hardin’s thesis was the relationship between finite resources and uncontrolled population growth. He divided the world, somewhat crudely, into comparatively rich and desperately poor nations and represented each rich nation as a lifeboat with limited capacity, surrounded by people seeking admission or a share of its resources. “Metaphorically, each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in, or at least to share some of the wealth. What should the lifeboat passengers do?”, he asked.
This was the way Hardin answered his own question: “So here we sit, say 50 people in our lifeboat. To be generous, let us assume it has room for 10 more, making a total capacity of 60. Suppose the 50 of us in the lifeboat see 100 others swimming in the water outside, begging for admission to our boat or for handouts. We have several options: we may be tempted to try to live by the Christian ideal of being ‘our brother’s keeper,’ or by the Marxist ideal of ‘to each according to his needs.’ Since the needs of all in the water are the same, and since they can all be seen as ‘our brothers,’ we could take them all into our boat, making a total of 150 in a boat designed for 60. The boat swamps, everyone drowns. Complete justice, complete catastrophe.”
After examining different scenarios, Hardin now confronted the problem: “The harsh ethics of the lifeboat become harsher when we consider the reproductive differences between rich and poor. A wise and competent government saves out of the production of the good years in anticipation of bad years to come. Joseph taught this policy to Pharaoh in Egypt more than 2,000 years ago. Yet the great majority of the governments in the world today do not follow such a policy. They lack either the wisdom or the competence, or both…Year by year the ratio becomes worse, as the fast-reproducing poor outnumber the slow-reproducing rich…”
In a recent article, Where Do the Children Go Now? – THISDAYLIVE, drawing on personal experience, I examined the low priority that Nigeria accords primary education and argued that vulnerable children require a coherent framework of support. But experience has also taught me that the crisis of out-of-school children cannot be addressed through education spending alone. It requires a three-pronged response. First, Nigeria must invest heavily in primary education, remove children from the streets and provide them with the foundational learning necessary to secure a meaningful future. Second, religious and traditional authorities must lead a sustained campaign for responsible parenthood and family formation. Third, politicians must support that effort by abandoning the convenient fiction that Nigeria possesses limitless wealth—a claim that encourages expectations the state cannot possibly meet.
Nigeria’s leadership failures are undeniable, but citizens must also recognise that sustainable development requires population growth to remain broadly consistent with the country’s capacity to educate, employ, house and protect its people. Therefore, now that campaigning for the 2027 general election has begun and every presidential candidate professes concern for the poor, population policy should be brought to the centre of the national debate. It should trouble every critical stakeholder that one of the few things Nigeria appears able to produce in ever-increasing abundance is children, while its capacity to secure their future continues to diminish. Changing that trajectory will require a credible and enforceable population policy, supported by education, healthcare, social protection and carefully designed incentives. That conversation can no longer be postponed!
Why not Mike Emenalo?
Whether they were pushed (as many of us suspect) or they actually jumped, the resignation of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) president, Ibrahim Gusau and several executive committee members, has presented a golden opportunity to reform football administration in Nigeria. And it is an opportunity President Tinubu must not waste. A few weeks ago, while in Nigeria to prepare for the premier of his movie ‘MKO’ on Ist October in Lagos, Hollywood filmmaker, Ose Oyamendan and I had spirited conversations on our football. He suggested, and I agreed with him, that the best person who can possibly help reform our football is Mike Emenalo, easily one of the biggest names in the world when it comes to elite football club management. Before going into film, Ose was one of the most notable sports journalists in Nigeria who also anchored what was then Africa’s biggest sports show, MASTERSPORTS.
The pertinent question here is: Can we afford Emenalo who is currently Director of Football for the Saudi Arabia Pro League, the same position he held in the English Premiership club, Chelsea and French Ligue 1 club, AS Monaco? I doubt. But as a former Super Eagles player, I am sure that if the president calls him, Emenalo can be persuaded to come home to help change the narrative of our football with his expertise, experience and exposure. That, for me, is the surest way to go. Otherwise, we will soon be back to the same old problem!
- You can follow me on my X (formerly Twitter) handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com
