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Let’s tame our population before fighting insecurity

By Ukasha Rabiu Magama,
08 August 2021   |   1:07 am
Nigeria being the most populous nation in Africa and fourth in the world, it will be very difficult for the government to tame the nation’s insecurity challenges so far as we keep giving birth to children anyhow.....

Sir: Nigeria being the most populous nation in Africa and fourth in the world, it will be very difficult for the government to tame the nation’s insecurity challenges so far as we keep giving birth to children anyhow; Nigeria is getting to be overpopulated.

Overpopulation is when the human population rises to an extent exceeding the carrying capacity of the ecological setting or a state whereby the available resources won’t be enough for the populace. Such resources include transportation means, water, shelter, food, education and health facilities among other social amenities.

This regularly contributes to crises and environmental deterioration, worsening in the quality of life, or even the disintegration of the population. This is the current Nigeria’s situation. For nearly two decades, it is terrible and annoying when the government in power watches its citizens dying all the day without having the mechanisms to put an end to the killings.

The problem of Nigeria is uncontrolled population; Nigeria’s population is bigger than the country’s available resources, which are inadequate to sustain the high population. Overpopulation can lead to depletion of natural resources, where by natural resources such as arable land, coral reefs, fresh water, fossil fuels, and wilderness forests continue to drop sharply as well as diminishing the quality of standards.

Similarly, overpopulation worsens numerous environmental and social factors such as pollution, malnutrition, overcrowded living conditions, and lacking health care, which makes poor communities vulnerable to infectious diseases. Diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and dysentery spread faster in overpopulated areas.

In the same vein, in regions where populations are high, people resort to farming practices that can produce more food products with cheaper inputs and without encroaching into surrounding lands due to the environmental protection policies. Intensive farming has thus resulted, and it has led to soil fertility depletion, re-emergence of parasites, the emergence of new parasites, loss of ecosystems, pollution of water systems, and decreased biodiversity.

The worst part is overpopulation brings about unemployment, the available jobs are fewer than the overall job seeking population. Therefore, it’s high time Nigeria’s government got ready to fight overpopulation before insecurity by implementing policies enforcing birth spacing in Nigeria. Those children who were born and brought up on the streets are the major problem of the nation because they are the ones being recruited by the unscrupulous elements as agents of societal destruction.

Nigerians should be educated to give birth to children that they can take care of instead of giving birth to many children without having the means to control and cater for their needs. Together, we can save Nigeria and put an end to the menace of insecurity in a simple way by adopting child spacing, let’s make our country better again for the future of younger generation.
By Ukasha Rabiu Magama, Toro LGA Bauchi State.
Ukasharabiu95@gmail.com

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