Today is World Population Day. The day was established by the governing council of the United Nations Development Programme in 1989 with the aim to draw attention to the urgency and importance of population issues around the globe.
According to the United Nations, this year’s World Population Day calls for global attention to the unfinished business of the 1994 international conference on population and development. In that conference, one hundred and seventy-nine governments recognized that reproductive health and gender equality were essential for achieving sustainable development.
Statistics reveal that world population is presently over seven billion and will hit eight billion by 2030. Based on this, advocates are calling on leaders, decision makers among others to help make reproductive health and right a reality because they will go a long way in checkmating adverse effects of population.
The US Census Bureau, while looking at the rate Nigerian population is rapidly growing at three per cent yearly, projects that by 2050, Nigeria’s population will double to four hundred and two million. This is scary.
Commenting on this, an activist, Mr Ejike Orji, said the number of people the country is producing yearly is faster than its development rate. He added that this is the reason the country had become number one country with the highest number of poor people.
It is sad that Nigeria as a country has no policy to limit births. The growing population is a time bomb waiting to explode. The nation’s population outweighs the infrastructure on ground and the political leaders seem to be at loss on what to do to tackle the issue.
Over population has numerous negative effects. However,
to avert this looming danger, effective family planning is the way out. Family planning is the practice of controlling the number of children one has and the intervals between their births, particularly by means of contraception and voluntary sterilization.
Family planning is not new in Nigeria, especially among the educated and governments have been contributing towards it but there is urgent need for them to increase their efforts. There is need for increased sensitization on family planning services across the length and breadth of Nigeria because effective family planning will, in many ways, help control Nigeria’s population.
Family planning is beneficial to the individual who practices it, to his or her family and to the society in general. It prolongs life, aids emotional bonding in families and increases wealth among numerous other benefits.
So as the world celebrates World Population Day today, let governments in Nigeria rise to the task of controlling our population for the overall wellbeing of the country.
