Nigeria Is Caught Up In Modern-Day Malthusian Trap, Atiku Abubakar Swears

Former Nigerian Vice President Atku Abubakar has said that Nigeria is caught up in a modern-day Malthusian Trap even as he argued that the country is technically out of recession but practically not out of it.

“What is happening in Nigeria is that as a nation, we are caught up in a modern-day Malthusian Trap. For years, our population has been growing faster than our Gross Domestic Product, bringing us to a point where we have an ever-increasing population competing for resources that are not keeping pace with population growth.

“After contracting for five consecutive quarters, Nigeria came out of recession in the second quarter of 2017 with a GDP growth rate of 0.55%. In the third quarter, we fared better with 1.40%.  While this looks somewhat like we exited the recession, the reality is that when you factor in our population growth rate of 2.3%, which is one of the highest in the world, have we really exited a recession? Technically, yes, but in reality, it is doubtful.”
Atiku Abubakar, who is currently the chieftain of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), spoke yesterday, Friday in a lecture at the Silverbird Man Of The Year 2017 Award in Lagos.

He argued that the social economic and security challenges which Nigeria is facing are actually symptoms and not the ailment.

“And as any doctor will tell you, you cannot get genuine long-lasting relief if you treat symptoms. You have to target and treat the root cause of the disease.
“It may sound simplistic, but if Nigeria can assemble a leadership focused on getting us out of this Malthusian Trap by gradually reversing the trend where population growth exceeds GDP growth, many of these challenges we are currently facing will slowly but surely fade away.
“Last year, we celebrated the fact that we exited our first recession in 25 years. To me, that celebration was premature.
“This month of February 2018, according to the World Poverty Clock, Nigeria has just overtaken India as the world’s capital of extreme poverty. There are more extremely poor people in Nigeria than there are in India, a country that has six times Nigeria’s population.
Atiku Abubakar said that when people do not have jobs and the means to start a business are beyond their reach, they are incrementally much more likely to engage in criminal behaviours like terrorism, kidnapping, militancy and armed robbery.
according to him, Nigeria has a median age of 18.3 years, adding that the nation’s population is young “so when we have successful and laudable initiatives like YouWIN, which according to the World Bank, was two and a half times more effective than Mexico’s similar youth job initiative and ten times more effective than Turkey’s own version, we must continue them even when there has been a change in administration.
“We talk of fighting corruption, but let us move beyond sentiments and media trials and look at the facts.
“We must try to identify why, though we have been ostensibly fighting corruption for the past few years, Transparency International, the official global anti-corruption monitoring agency, has not increased our Corruption Perception Index rating. The last time we made progress was in 2014.
“Not to belabour the point, but we have to kill the snake of corruption that swallows the commonwealth that should lift our people up from poverty. Whether that snake is in a JAMB Office or any other government office, we must kill it or it will kill us.
“Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. We have been in denial about restructuring, but with a failing economy, worsening insecurity, and negative indices in almost all spheres of the human development index, we can no longer run from the obvious.”
the former Vice President said that Nigeria needs to be restructured to fix Nigeria’s broken systems “and not just a campaign gimmick that we fish out of our magic hats and deny after we have gotten what we want.
“Let me say this: The Restructuring that I, Atiku Abubakar, envisions, will see no state receive less money from the federation account than it currently does. I hope that will ease the anxieties of some who oppose restructuring. Restructuring will not cheat you. It will free you.
“When I was in government, we reduced recurrent expenditure by introducing the monetization Policy and by privatizing many government enterprises, especially those that were consuming resources without generating revenue. Those policies have been bastardized today and we have seen a ballooning of our recurrent expenditure and shrinkage of our capital expenditure. We must return to the basics.
“We cannot spend 70% of our budget on recurrent expenditure at a time Nigeria has more unemployed or underemployed people than the entire population of the Republic of Cameroon.” [myad]