Africa’s problem is its population growth rate – there’s more

Africa’s problem is its population growth rate – there’s more

Thank you to the correspondents who have seen that the population explosion is the fundamental problem in Africa. This phrase used to be used a lot, with accompanying fretting – here is David Lamb, the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Nairobi writing in 1980 – “in 1960 only one African city, Kinshasa, had more than 500,000 people. Now there are ten.” He was rightly alarmed at this, yet today, just thirty years later, Wikipedia, quoting the United nations, lists 52 African cities with more than a million inhabitants:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_in_Africa

Yet the words ‘population explosion’ are hardly ever heard nowadays, even though Africa’s population is still doubling every twenty-odd years. With over half the inhabitants under the age of 15, is it any wonder that the continent has not yet got to the starting bloc? The countries which have thrived have invariably brought their population growth under control – China and India are the pre-eminent examples.

The type of rigorous enforcement that was needed to achieve this – sterilisation in India, the one-child policy in China – will not work in Africa because of the intense cultural pressures on its inhabitants to have as many children as possible. The only thing that will work – and has worked everywhere it has occurred – is a combination of growing prosperity and urbanisation. And this will only happen when Africans become landlords, with freehold title deeds that enable them to compete for wealth in the sort of vigorous property market one sees in developed countries. Yes, there are slumps and booms in this market, but if small families cannot be enforced, then the availability of things rather than children at a time there is enough money in the pocket to allow a decision to be made between the two is the only lever that will do the trick.

Of course, this is not the sort of competitive environment that the aid agencies envisage for Africa. Their view was summed up by John Galsworthy by, as it happens, that arch man of property, Soames, in The Forsyte Saga - “If one had children and not much income, the standard of taste and comfort must of necessity go down…besides it was nice to be able to take holidays unhampered. Sooner in fact than own children, they preferred to concentrate on the ownership of themselves…In this way little risk was run, and one would be able to have a motor car.”

Soames was deeply disapproving. Yet, while it may seem an awful thing to say, the reality is that for Africans to prosper, they must enter the rat-race.