Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa and the seventh most populous country in the world, will be the hub of Africa’s impending population boom. Projected to double its size from its current 201 million people to 401 million people by 2050, Nigeria will become the third most populous country in the world, meaning the West African giant’s domestic and foreign policy decisions will have continental — and global — repercussions. This will create significant challenges for future Nigerian governments, as the country’s youth bulge (46% of the current population is currently under the age of 15) will demand jobs and government responsiveness in exchange for peaceful democratic participation.
Present-day Nigeria is in a state of disarray and ill-equipped for a 50% population increase. Corruption permeates the government at all levels, rendering policy attempts to address rampant insecurity, poor service delivery and local economic stagnation ineffective. Newly elected President Bola Tinubu has implemented several drastic policy changes, including canceling a financially unsustainable fuel subsidy and beginning currency reform. But these measures are drops in the bucket of the structural adjustments Nigeria will need to accommodate — and thrive off — an influx of 200 million people by 2050.
On a long-term strategic level, the barometers introduced in part one of this series can give an indication of Nigeria’s capacity to make these adjustments, as well as hint at the implications of such rapid growth on the Nigerian state as we know it today.
Girls’ Education
Nigerian girls’ education rates over the next decade will perhaps be the largest determinant of national birth rates in the 2040s and 50s. The status quo paints a grim picture for both education and fertility rates in the years ahead. Nigeria currently accounts for 45% of all out-of-school children in West Africa, with girls accounting for nearly two-thirds of the country’s 14 million out-of-school children. 30% of Nigerian girls have never been to school at all, while millions begin primary school but drop out due to barriers like poverty, insecurity, lack of schools, child marriage, social norms and unaffordable school fees. Education in Nigeria is supposed to be free, but it is common for schools to collect ”hidden fees” from students to augment insufficient government funding. When a family cannot afford these ”hidden fees,” girls are often kept home to do household chores and work, while their brothers’ educations are prioritized. While social norms serve as barriers to girls’ education nationwide, this trend varies widely from region to region. Girls’ education rates tend to be lower in majority Muslim northern states where more traditional values lead to earlier marriages and less female participation in public life; only about 41% of girls receive primary education in Nigeria’s north-east, whereas 47% of girls attend school in the north-west. This trend is exacerbated by poverty and rampant insecurity in northern states: a girl from the poorest wealth quintile in a northern state has a 24% chance of enrolling in primary school and only a 9% chance of enrolling in secondary school, compared with an 87% and 79% chance, respectively, for girls in the south-south region, according to UNICEF.
Despite repeatedly promising to address the out-of-school crisis and gender disparities in schooling, the Nigerian government continues to underfund education. Only about 8%, or 1.79 trillion naira ($2.2 billion), of the 2023 national budget is allocated to the sector, and much of that funding never reaches schools due to state-level corruption. As they stand, Nigeria’s education programs and investments are highly unlikely to reverse current trend lines of out-of-school girls, let alone catch up to the country’s projected population increases. Without improvements in girls’ education, Nigeria’s birth rates are unlikely to taper off in the next 20-30 years, thereby sustaining the country’s population boom and offering even fewer opportunities for economic mobility through education.
Agricultural Innovation and Production
Nigeria’s ability to catalyze population growth into an opportunity rather than a risk will also hinge on agricultural innovation and production, both to ensure it has enough food and jobs for its growing number of people. Agriculture currently comprises about 22% of Nigeria’s GDP and serves as the country’s largest employer, accounting for 36% of the labor force. The vast majority of agricultural workers are smallholder farmers who grow approximately 90% of Nigeria’s produce. Nigeria is Africa’s largest rice producer; the country’s other major crops include maize, cassava, yams and millet. Even so, only 57% of the 6.7 million metric tons of rice consumed annually in Nigeria is produced locally, leaving a deficit of about 3 million metric tons to be smuggled in illegally, given the government’s ban on rice imports intended to stimulate domestic supply. While the government continues to strive for independence from international rice imports, the country relies on more than $10 billion of annual imports to meet other shortfalls of food staples, including for wheat, rice, poultry and fish.
Nigeria’s agricultural sector faces myriad challenges that limit its productivity along all points of its value chain. Lack of capital and access to technology, along with poor access to markets, limit the prevalence of irrigation farming and increase the sector’s vulnerability to climate shocks and extreme weather patterns. High fuel prices and the devaluation of Nigeria’s local currency have increased the cost of inputs per planting season, and global supply shortages of seedlings and fertilizers have further hindered farmers’ crop yield rates. Jihadist insurgencies’ and bandits’ encroachment on agricultural land also increases farmers’ vulnerability to theft and violence. These security risks have seen an increase in farmer-herder conflicts in the food-producing middle belt states by driving northern pastoralists south, leading to losses in livestock and grain and seed stores. Further, Nigeria has extremely poor transport infrastructure and services, particularly in rural agriculture-producing areas. These deficiencies lead to decreased trade capacity through losses from spoilage and delayed time to market.
The government has implemented several policy initiatives in recent years to reduce the country’s reliance on food imports, boost employment in the agricultural sector and better capitalize on the country’s 70.8 million hectares of agricultural land area (for comparison, the United States has 361 million hectares of agricultural land area, and Ethiopia has 38.5 million hectares). In October 2021, the government approved the implementation of the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Plan (NATIP), which is designed to modernize the agricultural sector, address Nigerian farmers’ needs and improve food security. The program is supposed to prioritize improving mechanization, boosting rural infrastructure, standardizing inputs, processing systems and techniques, and developing commodity value chains through clusters and special agro-processing zones. NATIP has so far led to some improvements in rice milling capacity — particularly with the construction of new Dangote Rice Industries rice mills in Jigawa, Kebbi Sokoto, Zamfara, Kano and Niger states, which together are slated to produce 700,000 million tons of rice per year. But the program has done little to spur the billions of investment in agricultural innovation that the country needs in order to become food secure. Nigeria’s failure to implement innovative solutions to inefficiencies in the agricultural sector means it will likely face a worsening food security crisis as its population grows. As a result, the country will have to either import food products to make up the deficit (which is unlikely, given the current shortfalls) or face an exodus of Nigerians seeking relief from hunger and poverty.
Urban Infrastructure and Services
Population growth is driving rapid urbanization in cities like Lagos, Abuja, Ibadan and Kano, where government services consistently fail to keep pace. Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city, already has over 15.9 million people with an annual urban growth rate of 6% (for comparison, the general population growth rate of 2.4%). 77% of Nigeria’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050. But rather than offering access to good jobs, healthcare and schools – the drivers behind urban migration – Nigeria’s cities offer squalid housing conditions, limited health and education services and poor sanitation, electricity and water services. Demand for housing in Nigeria’s three largest cities, Lagos, Ibadan and Kano — is growing by about 20% each year, which means that 700,000 new housing units would need to be built in 2023 to keep up with demand. While the actual number of affordable housing units added to urban markets in recent years hasn’t been recorded, it falls far short of demand, leaving millions to create makeshift structures in informal settlements.
Local governments allocate an average of 40% of municipal revenue to waste management, but overflowing dumpsters and landfills pollute soil and groundwater, threatening outbreaks of waterborne diseases like cholera. Access to clean drinking water is already severely inadequate, with only about 48% of the population having access to basic drinking water sources and 3% of urban households having access to piped water (down from 32% in 1990). Traffic and poor city planning limit intra-city mobility and transportation, while the millions of Nigerians living in informal settlements are largely disconnected from the electricity grid.
There are few signs that financial investment or corruption-limiting initiatives will change the efficacy of service delivery in and around cities in coming years, meaning that Nigeria’s rapid urbanization will likely be accompanied by high rates of disease, water shortages and crumbling roadways, transportation systems and housing facilities. Given the country’s disproportionately large youth population, the government’s failure to provide adequate urban services will likely also trigger bouts of political instability as millions of disenchanted young people take to the streets to demand change. Poor urban infrastructure and services also have obvious implications for health; waterborne diseases, in particular, will increasingly threaten to overwhelm Nigeria’s limited urban healthcare infrastructure as cities continue to expand.
Job Creation
Mass job creation is necessary for Nigeria to harness the economic growth potential of its booming population. Since 2015, the number of people under 24 years old who are unemployed has almost tripled to 14 million, with an estimated 40% of the country’s youth labor force now out of work, according to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics. This has forced many young Nigerians into underemployment in the informal sector, where low wages contribute to the country’s 83 million people who live on less than $1 per day. The unemployment rate has been rising over recent years, fueling concerns that the number of jobs created each year will continuously fall further behind the number of people entering the labor market. A study by Africa Growth Initiative, a research policy initiative at Brookings Institution, found that sectors like agro-processing, financial and business services, information and communications technology, tourism, transport and formal trade could create up to 56% of the projected new jobs needed between 2018 and 2035. However, this would take significant government and private investment, and would also likely primarily benefit skilled workers, doing little to alleviate unemployment in the unskilled informal sector.
In October 2022, the government launched a long-delayed job creation program known as the Special Public Works Program (SPW), which promises to target low-skilled workers and provide more than 750,000 jobs. The 52 billion naira ($136 million) program offers three-month-long job placements that pay 20,000 nairas ($26) a month, less than the national minimum wage of 30,000 nairas (about $40) a month. While government programs such as the SPW may alleviate the short-term burden of unemployment for a small subsection of Nigeria’s youth, it is far from the type of structural employment opportunities necessary to drive sustainable employment for millions more Nigerians in years to come. Increasing investment and access to technology in the agricultural sector appears to be one avenue for job creation in production, manufacturing and exports, but like each of the preceding indicators, requires greater capital investment and the absence of corruption to fuel sustained growth.
On top of not having enough jobs for low-skilled workers, Nigeria will also likely continue to struggle with brain drain (locally known as ”japa”), which has seen droves of the country’s skilled workers (doctors, in particular) move to Western countries like Canada and the United Kingdom in search of better career opportunities. In the coming years, even more doctors and nurses will likely seek employment abroad as Nigeria’s growing population further strains the country’s healthcare system, creating more work for healthcare professionals who are already underpaid and face cumbersome bureaucratic hurdles.
Nigeria’s Long-View: More People, More Problems
Nigerian girls’ low education rates, insufficient investment in agricultural production and innovation, poor provision of urban services and limited job creation initiatives indicate that the country is headed for massive overpopulation and underdevelopment. While this list of indicators is certainly not exhaustive, together they show that the Nigerian state is unprepared and ill-equipped to handle its impending population boom. The state’s inability to provide adequate schooling means that the number of girls out of school is likely to rise, very likely sustaining high fertility rates across the country, but especially in the north. High fertility rates will, in turn, likely maintain Nigeria’s high population growth rate, worsening the country’s food security outlook over the medium to long term given the government’s insufficient investment in agricultural innovation. As the population grows and becomes increasingly food-insecure
larger and more food-insecure population, more Nigerians will move to urban centers in search of economic opportunities, further straining municipal infrastructure and state services and likely worsening urban residents’ access to water, health and education services. Without massive structural reform and investment, the Nigerian economy is unlikely to support the level of job creation needed to employ the burgeoning working population, which means millions will likely be unemployed or underemployed.
The government’s inability to provide basic services and employment, in addition to regional disparities, will likely further complicate Nigeria’s statehood and create new risks of political instability. Despite many Nigerians’ limited access to electricity and internet, technological advances mean that the country’s youth population is still becoming increasingly connected and able to politically mobilize. This has already seen a growing number of younger citizens in Nigeria and other African countries demand greater economic stability and social services from their governments. Amid an environment of overpopulation and underdevelopment, young Nigerians are increasingly likely to mobilize against government failures to provide these services, likely creating new risks for Nigerian governance and stability in the event of a widely popular social or political movement that challenges the ruling order.
Regional disparities will exacerbate this risk as well. If these trends continue, the implications of massive population growth, food insecurity, lack of services and unemployment will disproportionately impact Nigeria’s poorer and less developed northern states, which (as discussed above) also have much higher birth rates and far more limited education services. Nigeria is already deeply divided along regional and religious lines, with the northern Muslim states frequently at odds with the southern Christian states, and both in conflict with the secessionist southeastern states. But the added stress on already strained systems from the country’s booming population will likely exacerbate these divisions and increase competition for resources, potentially fracturing Nigeria’s power-sharing system.