Life expectancy and economic situation of Nigeria

SIR: Life expectancy is a measure of the length of life expected to be lived by an individual at birth. Improvement of life expectancy to at least 70 years by 2020 and above is one of Nigeria’s health policy target. Life expectancy is frequently utilized and analysed in the composition of demographic data for the countries of the world, for the attainment of mortality experience, and for more reliable international comparisons.

Indeed, life expectancy is very crucial to the developing worlds which are earnestly striving for achieving socio-economic progress through investing significantly in social sectors like health, education, sanitation, environmental management, and sustainability.

In Nigeria, as in other developing countries, variations in morbidity and mortality have been associated with a wide variety of measures of socio-economic status, including per capita GDP, fertility rate, adult illiteracy rate, per capita calories intake, health care expenditure, access to portable drinking water, urban inhabitants, unemployment rate and the nominal exchange rate.

In fact, over the last decade, several investigators have documented the stagnation or possible decrease in life expectancy among Nigeria residents on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Recent research has found that, at least in some groups of Nigerians, deaths due to drug overdose have increased dramatically in recent years and that this increase is largely responsible for the overall stagnation of historic trends toward increased life expectancy.

Even, in the years to come, life expectancy of common man and middle class in Nigeria tends to also decrease dramatically due to the increase in population, high cost of food stuffs, drugs and many more in the markets. This has resulted in the increase of production of fake drugs which litter the markets.

Recently, National Agency for Food & Drugs Administration and Control (NAFDAC) alerted Nigerians to be wary of fake drugs which are distributed by unscrupulous elements.

A commonly cited source is an economic downturn and its effect on expectations about future job prospects and on the self-perception of individuals as successful providers for their families. This study examines the link between mortality of older, working aged (45 to 64) Nigeria adults and local economic shifts to evaluate the role of job prospects in various causes of death and their related mortality trends.

Another suggestion by a separate line of researchis that poor economic prospects introduce stress leading to harmful biological effects and several
types of chronic disease. Different from the deaths of the despair approach, this “weathering” hypothesis predicts increased mortality from stress-related chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer as an outcome of economic downturns. While these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, they do suggest different pathways for understanding the relationship between the economy and health and mortality. Separating deaths by cause is critical to understanding the relative importance of each pathway.

And, indeed, one of the tools that we use to measure the growth of an economy is the Gross Domestic Product, and it is very clear that as far as the GDP is concerned, Nigeria is not doing very well.

Some of the reasons responsible for the struggle are clearly known. One of them is insecurity; the insecurity in the country assumed an alarming proportion and because of the high degree of insecurity, a huge chunk of money that would have been used to boost other areas of the economy is being diverted to take care of the insecurity.

Another thing that has happened as a result of the insecurity is that the level of agricultural production we would have been getting from our human capital has dwindled.

When you look at the killings in some part of Nigeria, especially around the Middle Belt, North-East and other hotspots, communities where we have farmers and fishermen were mostly affected. Nigeria has lost so much in the area of food security; so, to that extent, you can see clearly that the insecurity has caused so much damage to our economic security due to lack of proper food security.
• Adémólá Orúnbon is a Lagos-based journalist, poet and public affairs analyst.He canbe reached via: [email protected]  or 08034493944; 08029301122.