Nigeria

By

 


Lagos - Over 30 Million People 



POPULATION


This case study of Nigeria, building on


Global Demographics and Population Projections


illustrates the problems that recently-independent countries, especially in Africa, have had. Rapid population growth has made it difficult to deal with these problems in the past; continued large population growth in the future will be even more burdensome. 


Nigeria became independent in 1960. Its population was 45 million people. In 2024 its population was 233 million people. Nigeria’s capital, Lagos, is already one of the largest cities in the world. In 2050 its projected population will be in the range of 375-400 million people, depending on how fast its birth rate continues to come down. Around that year Nigeria will replace the United States as the third most populous country in the world. 

 

By 2100, Nigeria is projected to have at least 750 million people, which will be about equal to the projected population of China.

 

Nigeria’s birth rate in 2023 was 4.5, substantially higher than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Although the birth rate is down from the high of 6.9 in 1979, it is still one of the highest in the world. Government programs to reduce the birth rate are part of health care programs, which are being cut back because the stopping of U.S. aid for health care, which includes birth control programs.

 

ECONOMY


This forms the backdrop for discussing Nigeria’s current problems and prospects for economic growth and development. One conclusion is obvious: Nigeria will need very high and sustained economic growth rates to overcome the rapid increase in population and increase the country’s real per capita income. 

 

Nigeria’s economy still depends on oil; Nigeria is a major oil exporter. Real per capita income goes up and down with the price of oil. Economic statistics tend to indicate that real per capita income has not increased in decades.

 

One of the successful areas of economic growth is telecommunications. About 90% of the population has mobile phones and about 25% have internet access. Data center capacity is expanding.


Nigeria is forming economic ties with China. In June-August 2025, Chinese exports rose almost 60%. The increase was tied to Chinese Belt and Road infrastructure projects in the country, led by demand for equipment to build Chinese-financed railroads and power generation.


ELECTRICITY

 

A crucial reason for the lack of economic growth has been the government’s failure to provide enough dependable electricity.

 

The electricity power grid is owned and operated by the government. Of Nigeria’s 233 million people, over 90 million do not have access to electricity. Nigeria’s electricity production per person is one of the lowest in the world. Long term underinvestment results in frequent blackouts and shortages. Many users, including the government, do not pay their electricity bills; revenue accounts for about 65% of operating costs.

 

Private gas-powered generators generate more than twice as much electricity as the power grid. Nigerians’ spending on off-grid power is equal to 60% of the government’s entire budget. Cities suffer from noise and air pollution.


Over half of the country’s manufacturing sector is not connected. New data centers have to provide their own power.

 

There are plans to build off-grid solar and other renewable energy projects. Even if successful, they will not close Nigeria’s massive electricity shortage. And if successful, there will probably be fewer customers on the grid, making it even harder to expand and modernize it. 

 

Government energy policy seems inconsistent; it would like to have solar projects connected to the grid, but it is also thinking about banning solar panel imports.

 

     This discussion of electricity is based on The                                     Economist, “A nation in the dark,” May 10, 2025,         38.


Unless banned, roof-top solar panel installations will probably increase rapidly. The price of Chinese exported solar panels has fallen over 50% in the last three years because of overcapacity and price wars.


China has built a high-speed rail line between two suburbs.

 

POLITICAL

Nigeria’s borders were established by England, Nigeria’s colonial master, in 1898. England combined several kingdoms into an arbritary
administrative area.
 

The largest ethnic group – Hausa – makes up about 30% of the population. But there are about 275 distinct ethnic groups and about 500 languages and dialects. The population is about evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Muslims predominate in the north, Christians in the south. There is resentment in the north that the south has benefited more from the oil wealth. The Muslim population, with a higher birth rate, is increasing its share of the total population.  


 

Nigeria has had a tumultuous political history since independence. National politics has been dominated by military coups, fighting among top military officers for power, and brutal military governments. Civilian governments have tended to be corrupt. 2023 was the first national election in Nigeria’s history where no “civilian” candidate was not a former military ruler.  

 

There was a brutal civil war shortly after independence. The predominantly Muslim region in the north is experiencing jihadist terrorism.

 

Politics has suffered from widespread corruption and the inability to support economic development beyond oil extraction. The country suffers from high inflation and large government fiscal deficits.


OTHER TOPICS

 

The oil producing region of Nigeria is one of the most polluted areas in the world.

 

As farmers attempt to expand food production, the result has been massive deforestation as bad as in the Amazon. Even with this, food production has not kept up with population growth. Nigeria has gone from being a net food exporter to a net food importer.


According to Doctors Without Borders, there is widespread malnutrition in northern Nigeria.

 

Global warming has made producing food more difficult. It is one reason for the large rural migration to the cities.


===================================== 


For a discussion of Africa's demographics and future population, see the essay cited above.


Global Demographics and Population Projections



There are other essays on demographics and population projections for the global economy and individual countries.



For a variety of essays, with links, on this blog, see


List of Post by Topics




 


Comments

Post a Comment

Most Popular Posts

Adam Smith's Pin Factory

By
Image
Adam Smith - Our Founding Father ADAM SMITH VISITS A PIN FACTORY   Adam Smith’s description of a pin factory is on the first page of  The Wealth of Nations .  (Chapter 1 – “Of the Division of Labour”)  Drawings of pin factories of this period show workers using hand tools. Smith says the process can be broken down into 18 distinct steps, including packaging the pins. Smith mentions that pin factory workers were poorly paid, despite their high productivity.    Adam Smith says he visited a pin factory employing 10 men who produced 48,000 pins per day. If each of the ten workers had done all the steps themselves, Smith says each worker could produce only 10 or 20 pins per day. So the pin factory supposedly replaces 2,400 to 4,800 pin makers. The increase in labor productivity (output per person per day) is as high as 50 times that of individual pin makers.     This reduction in unit cost or average cost (AC) and the huge increase in ...
Read more

Bilateral Oligopoly

By
Image
The best movie about the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is titled My Darling Clementine. A great western - great cast, great photography.  DEFINITION OF A BILATERAL OLIGOPOLY Models of market structure assume that the demand side is represented by a large number of buyers.  The structure of the market, and the assumed market outcomes, depends on the number of suppliers and how they compete.  Suppliers either post one price or exploit their knowledge of buyer categories by using price discrimination.  Despite the comments about the key role of consumers in determining economic performance, consumers are fairly passive when the discussion focuses on imperfectly-competitive industries.  But many markets are not structured this way; the buyers are not passive consumers but large corporations that do not passively accept suppliers’ prices.  Net prices are actively negotiated.  These markets are often bilateral oligopolies. In a bilateral oligo...
Read more

The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression

By
Image
Famous Headline Before You Begin If you don't know the background of this complicated story, you might want to first read a shorter version that introduces some of the key factors explaining the Crash and the Depression. See, Introduction to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the Beginning of the Great Depression Before reading this essay, I strongly recommend you see the PBS video on YouTube. Type in Stock Market Crash 1929. Look for US – The Crash of 1929 (PBS), ALLHISTORIES – PLAYLIST.  Documentary broken into 6 parts to show commercials. Or buy the video on Amazon Prime. Great documentary with wonderful photos, videos, and scenes from movies of the 1920s and the crash. Shows what a crazy time it was. The video is also a great introduction to Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929:  Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History - and How It Shattered a Nation.  This book concentrates on the roles played by a small number of key men; the video also focuses on these me...
Read more

List of Posts By Topic

By
Image
FIND POSTS BY CATEGORY The Beginning of the Industrial Revolution The theme of the following four sections of the blog is that innovation, not price competition, is the basis for understanding economic growth, competition, and analysis. Basic Concepts and Theory Market Behavior and Structure Market Dynamics and Information:  How Markets Work Economic Theory and Markets Corporate Strategies There is beginning a historic change in future populations and their demographics. This will interact with other variables and have a serious, maybe profound, effect on future economic growth. Demographics and Economics China Geopolitics and the Global Economy American Economic History Management The world seems to be in the midst of radical political and social change. Where are we going? Can studying past periods and countries facing disrupting change help us navigate our times? Maybe. History American History World War I:  The Beginning of the 20th Century The Roman Republic and Amer...
Read more

Government Finance 101. Fiscal Policy: Welcome to Alice in Wonderland

By
Image
Secretary of the Treasury PRELIMINARY SUMMARY OF FISCAL YEAR 2025 BUDGET   The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) made their latest projection in January, 2025. The projected deficit in fiscal year 2025 will be around $1.8 trillion, the difference between about $5.2 trillion in revenue and $7.0 trillion in expenses. Interest on the national debt this year will be around $950 billion, over twice the interest expense in the fiscal year 2021 budget and equal to the defense budget. By 2035, the CBO expects the  yearly  budget deficit to increase to $2.7 trillion.   Interest expense this year passed budgeted outlays for the military. It is about equal to Medicare, and also to total non-defense discretionary spending.   Leaving aside Social Security and Medicare, interest expense is  about 20% of total budget outlays. Interest expense is about half the budget deficit.   The $1.8 trillion budget deficit is 6-7% of total GDP, or approximately 10% of consume...
Read more

Explaining Derivatives - An Analogy

By
Image
You go around to farmers with cows. You buy all the cows and pay the farmers a small fee to milk the cows and sell the milk. You pay for the cows with ass(et)-backed securities called MBSs (Milked Bovine Securities) that you tell investors are udderly safe. But some of the cows don't give enough milk (cow flow problems) or give no milk at all. You take some of the asset-backed securities, say they're backed by the subprime cows, and use them as collateral to sell another set of securities called CMOs (Cow Milk Obligations). Then you buy CDSs (Cow Dried-up Swaps) from AIG (Angus Insurance Company) to insure the CMOs when the cows stopped giving milk. If you work it right, you collect more on the CDSs than you pay out to retire the CMOs. The money you get from selling the dead cows go to pay the CLOs (cow leather obligations). You could also sell CDOs (cow dung obligations) that depend on how much cow dung is produced. This is a typical Wall Street product - turning s...
Read more

Josiah Wedgwood, the Wedgwood Pottery Company, and the Beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England

By
Image
Wedgwood Anti-Slavery Cameo A better introduction to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution than Adam Smith is the history of Josiah Wedgwood and the Wedgwood Pottery Company. This is how one company actually ushered in the Industrial Revolution. The revolutionary generation that first adopted steam engines saw the following trends and changes: Manufacturing was being modernized by a small group of entrepreneurs. Much of the new raw material processing and manufacturing was concentrated in a small area in the middle of England, away from London. These modernizing entrepreneurs formed a new economic, intellectual and social network. Modernizing entrepreneurs like Wedgwood tended to be members of Dissenting sects (like Quakers) or Nonconformist churches (not members of the Church of England), Whigs (liberals) in politics, and believers in “progress.” They were optimistic about the future, influenced by the ideas of Hume, Rousseau, Locke and Adam Smith. They believed...
Read more

John von Neumann Sees the Future

By
Image
John von Neumann JOHN VON NEUMANN CREATES THE FUTURE If you want to understand the world we live in, you have to know about the thinking of three men – Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and John von Neumann.   I’ve talked a little about Alan Turing in an earlier essay.   All three men knew each other, discussed their thinking with each other, and promoted each other’s ideas. John von Neumann has been called the smartest individual of the 20 th Century (by his brother-in-law, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics).   A n outline of von Neumann's accomplishments, which you can read about in  Wikipedia, is hard to believe.   He invented game theory, which I discussed in two earlier posts.   He belonged to a group of mathematicians who invented new statistical techniques at Los Alamos that made the atomic bomb possible. He invented game theory. In 1944, he wrote a memo that outlined the structure of the modern computer.   He then managed the design a...
Read more

The Roman Republic Commits Suicide: A Cautionary Tale for America

By
Image
Roman Legion Why Study Rome? Americans have focused on comparisons between Rome and America twice in American history.  The first time was during the period from before the Revolution to after the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, when the founding fathers and others looked to the Roman Republic for ideas and inspiration on how to structure the new government. After the American Revolution, the founding fathers, having read the Roman authors detailing the collapse of the Roman republic, worried about internal threats to the survival of their new republic.   The second time was when the United States became a superpower, especially after WWII, and then again after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Commentators compared America to the Roman Empire at the height of its power. There was some discussion about how America became a permanent warfare state and how it affected domestic democracy and civil society. ...
Read more

The English East India Company (EIC): Trade with Asia

By
Image
The Mughal emperor Shah Alam hands a scroll to Robert Clive, the governor of Bengal, which transferred tax collecting rights in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company.  Illustration: Benjamin West (1738–1820)/British Library INTRODUCTION   The English East India Company (EIC) was an innovative new type of corporation. It is a model for the modern limited-liability, stockholder-funded modern corporation. The EIC also illustrates that the prototype of the modern multinational corporation was created to develop global trade.   HISTORIC BACKGROUND   The creation of the English East India Company (EIC) and its Dutch equivalent (the VOC) were part of the 400-year expansion of European power, trade, and influence. Much  of the rest of the world became colonies, part of imperial empires. By 1600, both England and Holland had a wealthy merchant and shipping class, bankers, substantial liquid capital (wealth) not tied up in land, and risk-takers. These categor...
Read more