78 - A Coming Global Demographic Cataclysm
typos corrected
The planet is getting crowded. Later this year the UN Population Division predicts that we will top 8 billion people across the globe. By 2050, we will have nearly 10 billion neighbors. But only five disparate countries will account for much of the population surge: surprisingly, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, and Pakistan. China will be shrinking, not growing. Indeed, by next year India will be more populous than China, at around 1.4 billion people. (These chilling estimates of demographic increases include deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, from HIV-AIDS, from malaria, from auto mishaps, and from guns in the United States. They also reflect all of the unnecessary war deaths in, and out-migration from, Ukraine, its population falling by 7 million people, down to about 37 million.)
By 2050, says the UN, a full quarter of the world’s population will be African. It is African fertility, nearly 6 children per woman, and its continued poverty and lack of education for girls, that are the main accelerators of the globe’s dramatic demographic rise. Indeed, four of the nations of Africa will vault over more established places to become among the most peopled nine countries on earth. By 2050, Nigerians, now numbering about 210 million, will approximate the 375 million Americans that will inhabit these United States. Thereafter, Nigeria will continue growing its numbers much more rapidly than the US. By 2080 or so, it will count 620 million persons in its midst and be the third largest place on the planet.
The US will slip to fourth place, worldwide. But what is unexpected and alarming is that immediately following the US in these demographic sweepstakes will be Pakistan at 400 million in 2080, Indonesia at 327 million in 2080, and the Democratic Republic of Congo at 308 million in the same year. The Congo’s population now is about 96 million. Ethiopia, now harboring 110 million people, will swell to 274 million in 2080. Tanzania is growing even more rapidly: 63 million now, it will jump to 137 million in 2050 and 223 million in 2080. Thereafter, both the Congo and Tanzania will keep growing until they surpass every other African nation except Nigeria. By the end of the century they may even include more citizens than Pakistan and Indonesia.
These predictions of human proliferation are beginning to cause consternation because Africa is wholly unprepared for, and not yet worrying about, what its wild demographic surge is going to mean, to cost, and to endanger. Educating girls reduces fertility dramatically. But places like Tanzania and the Congo are not schooling girls to the same extent as other African countries. And in Nigeria fertility rates among Muslim women in the north are three times higher than among Christian women in the south, for the same reason.
Lagos and Kinshasa are already among the most crowded and most complex urbanities in the world. They are growing faster than Cairo, Tokyo, and Mexico City, but lack the infrastructure of those more established cities. Supplies of potable water are limited, water-borne sanitation is hardly widespread, and movement across their sprawling terrains takes forever. Nigeria now has 100 cities of more than a 1 million people; soon it will have 300 such cities. In poor and little developed Malawi, overgrown villages are becoming the nucleus of conurbations. Ouagadougou, the capital of Islamist-threatened Burkina Faso, is growing at unheard of rates, and will soon be a city of 5 million; it is mushrooming by almost 5 percent a year.
How will Africa’s new populations be fed? Only a handful of Africa’s sub-Saharan countries now grow enough maize, manioc, wheat, teff, and (real) yams to feed themselves. They slaughter sheep and goats, and even camels, but supplies of meat on the hoof are ultimately limited by periodic droughts caused by climate change. The war in Ukraine has also halted the ready availability of wheat to make bread – a staple in some countries. Countries in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa are already experiencing famine and hunger. Malthus may have been right to worry about the planet running out of food, albeit 150 years ahead of time.
Of equal significance, where will the jobs come from to supply income and dignity to Africa’s newly abundant citizens? Today, only about 3 percent of sub-Saharan Africans are older than 65. The continent not only as 25 percent of the world’s citizens, but it also has vast numbers who are aged 18-34. Today’s median age of 18 will only rise very slowly, and will not exceed 25 until about 2060.
What are these young people, only half of whom will be well-schooled, going to do? If they can’t obtain formal employment they will obviously drift, as many already do, into informal wage working. “Informal” includes cleaning car windows at urban stop-lights and selling cell-phone chargers and vegetables along city streets. But it also includes crime; joining gangs or jihadist marauding armies becomes an obvious alternative. So does becoming fed-up with prospects in one’s own country and migrating illegally to another – or trying to travel overland and than by sea to Europe. Swelling numbers of young people will hardly mitigate the demographic determinants that drive abductions for ransom in northern Nigeria, siphoning petroleum from off-shore pipelines in southern Nigeria, or becoming pirates at sea in the Gulf of Guinea.
Already, formal unemployment rates are north of 30 and in many places exceed 40 percent. Zimbabwe’s comparable rate has been 90 percent for some time. The planet’s youngest and most fecund continent hardly serves its inhabitants well now, and increasing numbers are going to drive renewed complications.
Youth numbers, youth despair, governance patterns across most of Africa that enrich elites and are not readily seen to provide employment or social services for youths, make enlisting in Islamist insurgencies attractive. The Islamic State of the Greater Sahara, the Islamic State of West Africa, al-Shabaab of Somalia, and new jihadist offshoots in Mozambique and the Congo all draw from the ranks of those ill-served by contemporary political leaders and the inordinately stressed regimes that they run.
The political leaders of Africa are mostly governing unaware of the population trap that is about to snare them. Few are taking heed, and making the kinds of social and economic preparations that might help to alleviate the dramatic consequences of the demographic guillotine.
The developed world is not immune, either, from these developments. Migrancy will grow, not shrink. Jihadists will become more powerful and dangerous. Peace and stability in Africa will affect the rest of the world. Mutations of existing diseases and new diseases will threaten the entire world, not just Africa.
USAID, and the Canadian, British, Swedish, Danish, and Japanese aid agencies must make haste to help the poor countries of Africa prepare and mitigate the consequences of new numbers. Presidents and prime ministers of wealthy countries in the north would also do well to raise these demographic concerns with their counterparts in the South. Family planning efforts and financing needs to be tripled, US bans against doing so must be lifted, and social investments (to reduce unemployment) need to be redoubled. There is little time, and too much to do.