The population myth

For nearly two years now, the National Population Council (NPC), through its executive director, has been prosecuting an alarmist campaign against Ghana’s supposedly “very high” population growth – a campaign that seems to be driven more by a willful disregard for facts and history than a genuine desire to enlighten the public on the very important subject of population and development.

Recently, the executive director was reported to have called for “the enforcement of a policy that will enjoin couples to give birth to a maximum of three babies as a resolute measure to control population growth”.

It is not clear whether this proposal, Orwellian as it is, reflects the personal wishes of the executive director, or the informed position of the entire Council, but it must be said that there is no research – not in Ghana or anywhere else – that identifies “three children per couple” as the optimal threshold for the development of any nation.

The figure seems arbitrary and whimsical, even dangerous, given the sensitive subject matter, and the sooner the Council itself speaks publicly to it and the larger campaign, the better it would be for its reputation as the government’s chief adviser on matters of population and development.

Contrary to the campaign’s repeated claims, Ghana does NOT face an imminent crisis of population growth. If anything, it has made remarkable progress on key population indicators since the 1960s and is on course to do even better for the remainder of this century. It just needs to manage success better.

What then is the basis of the NPC’s scaremongering, which seems eerily similar to one being waged by right-wing ideologues in Europe who falsely blame “high” population growth in Africa for their self-inflicted “migrant crisis”?

We gather from the various news reports that the NPC typically compares Ghana’s population figures to world averages (or individual European countries) and then concludes that Ghana is doing so badly that something drastic must be done.

But world population averages are grossly distorted by data from developed countries, which have significantly different demographic profiles built over a much longer period of modern development. For them, high population growth occurred more than 100 years ago, at the beginning of their socio-economic transformation to urbanisation and industrialisation when the average woman in Europe, for example, had up to eight children in her lifetime, more than twice the 2017 figure for Ghana. This is known as the fertility rate.

Today, these developed countries, having undergone a demographic transition of plunging birth rates, shrinking labour forces, and ageing populations, are facing a very different population problem of low growth; in some cases, so low that population levels are projected to decline significantly before the close of this century. In effect, they face extinction.

Japan’s population, for instance, has fallen by 1.2 million people in the past seven years and is projected by the UN to fall further from the current 127 million to 84 million by 2100.

Germany, one of 75 countries listed by the UN as having “below-replacement fertility”, took in 1.5 million refugees recently not because it loves immigrants but because it deemed that the quickest route to boosting its dangerously low birth rate. And Norway is contemplating “high fertility” immigrants in the future to solve its own problems of low birth rates and a disappearing labour force. Nearly 30 years ago, the US introduced the “diversity” visa lottery to address its falling birth rates and shrinking labour force.

It is clear from the above that the population dynamics of developed countries are markedly different from those of developing countries and, therefore, cannot be lumped together as the basis for drawing important policy conclusions. They face a problem of depopulation, not over-population. Each country must be assessed on its own merit or, if need be, in relation to countries of comparable histories and stages of development.

This is where Ghana’s record (on its own and compared to Sub-Saharan Africa) stands in sharp contrast to the apocalyptic picture painted by the NPC. Let’s consider the following highlights:

- Population growth: Ghana’s (annual) population growth peaked at 3.48% in 1983 and has been declining ever since, reaching an estimated 2.35% in 2014 and 2.2% in 2017, according to the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) and the World Bank. The 2017 figure for Sub-Saharan Africa was 2.7%. (Note that the 2.5% frequently cited by the NPC as Ghana’s current population growth is nearly 10 years out of date; similarly, the national population figure of 24.6 million that appears on the Council’s website, as of July 31st 2018, is from the 2010 census and is different from the 29.6million estimated by GSS for 2018).

- Fertility: From a high of 6.75 in 1960, Ghana’s fertility rate has fallen steadily to an estimated 3.98 as of 2017 (compared to 4.85 for Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank), although the figure for Ghana tends to vary according to the source of research or analysis. Whatever the case, the current figure is less than 4.0 and the GSS projects a continuous decline to 2.1 “between 2060 and 2065”. That means couples will have enough children to replace themselves, with “one-tenth of a child extra to make up for mortality of children and women who will not survive to the end of the reproductive years”, according to GSS’s “Ghana Population Prospects”. The UN projects a fertility rate of 1.92 for Ghana by 2100, at which point Ghana’s population will start declining.

- Urbanisation: With greater and better educational and economic opportunities in cities and towns, urban areas have historically had lower fertility rates and thus served as a brake on overall population growth. Ghana’s urban fertility rate in 2014, for instance, was 3.4, compared to 5.1 for rural areas. The slowdown in Ghana’s fertility and population rates over the years was largely due to the brisk pace of urbanisation, from 23.25% in 1960 to 55.31% in 2017. Effective management of future urbanisation (with the efficient provision of essential services like education and health and the proper planning of human settlements) should exert further downward pressure on population growth – more in line with the inherent desires of families and the country’s development needs than the arbitrary capping of the number of children-per-couple that lacks empirical justification and is more suitable for a police state, not a democracy.

In other words, the mere aggressive reduction of a nation’s population growth is no guarantee that development will follow, but properly managed development that creates socio-economic opportunities everybody (boys and girls, men and women) will definitely find its ideal population level for sustainable development into the future.

All of which takes us back to the insidious campaign in Europe to suppress population growth in Africa for a problem that Europeans, not Africans, created. Could the NPC campaign be an unwitting extension of its European counterpart, which operates through “foreign aid”? It is certainly worth a probe.

According to the Quartz news portal of 20th July, 2017, “Denmark thinks free birth control for African countries will slow Europe’s migrant crisis”. The accompanying story reported a US$14 million pledge by the Danish government to support this racist 21st-century exercise in eugenics.

If indeed high population growth in Africa leads to increased migration to Europe, then it should have happened several years ago, when birth rates were high and poverty more pervasive than now. The primary cause of increased migration from Africa to Europe, therefore, is not the failure of Africans to control their sexual impulses but the 2011 invasion and destruction of the North African country of Libya by NATO, of which Denmark is a member.

Two things happened with that invasion: (1) With the death of Gaddafi and state institutions, Libya became an open highway for those trying to reach Europe through Italy. Asylum applications to Italy had been declining for nearly two years before the invasion, only to increase thirtyfold afterwards, following failed attempts to reverse it. And (2) The invasion led to the collapse of billions of dollars in Libyan investments across Africa, particularly in the employment-intensive agro-processing sector. The result was to aggravate an already serious unemployment problem and send thousands of desperate men and women on the perilous journey to Europe through the Sahara and high seas.

But even before the invasion, European protectionist policies that discouraged industrialisation and job creation in Africa by imposing higher tariffs on manufactures from Africa but little or no tariffs on raw materials had contributed in no small measure to the growth of a restless youthful population on the continent.

As a Ghanaian proverb says, “The crying child who would not let his mother sleep, will himself not sleep”. Similarly, countries that will not allow others to have their peace and stability cannot expect to have theirs. Nor can they create prosperity for themselves at the expense of others without expecting those “others” to come for what is theirs in the future. The migrants, in a sense, I entitled to be in Europe.

The problem, therefore, is not about Africans having too many babies, but rather external forces destabilising Africa and worsening that by creating an uneven playing field in international trade.

The NPC may want to be mindful about this high-stakes geo-demographic and economic intrigues.