Standard 9 - Nigerian Demography

Nigeria is the largest country in Africa by population. As of 2000, its population was estimated to be 117 million, placing it first among African countries and tenth among all countries. These figures are forecast to dramatically change in the future, however. One projection of Nigeria’s population estimates that it will reach the level of 338 million by the year 2050. If this estimate and other country estimates are correct, Nigeria would move from tenth most populous country in the world to the fourth most populous country in the short span of 50 years. The tables below place Nigeria’s rapid forecasted growth in global perspective.

Countries Ranked by Population: 2000 (in millions)

1 China	1,256
2 India	1,017
3 United States	275
4 Indonesia	219
5 Brazil	174
6 Russia	146
7 Pakistan	141
8 Bangladesh	129
9 Japan	126
10 Nigeria	117


    Countries Ranked by Population: 2050 (in millions)

1 India	1,707
2 China	1,322
3 United States	394
4 Nigeria	338
5 Indonesia	331
6 Pakistan	260
7 Brazil	228
8 Bangladesh	211
9 Congo (Kinshasa)	184
10 Mexico	167

The above estimates, however, rest on a number of very important assumptions. The first is that the Nigerian population will continue to increase at the relatively rate. Before we turn to some of the specific factors behind the rate of population growth, a few general remarks should be made about statistics.

As the statistics above indicate, Nigeria is a country with a rapidly growing population. One of the statistics used to compare and analyze the rate of population growth or decline is the rate of natural increase. It is calculated by subtracting the annual number of deaths per 1,000 people from the number of births per 1,000. This formula should yield a number that can be read as a percentage (rates typically run between -0.5 % and 4.0 %). Nigeria’s rate of natural increase for 1999 was 3.0 %. This percentage is significantly higher than that for the world as a whole (1.5%) and all of the continental averages, including Africa:

The real significance of Nigeria’s demographic situation is that it simultaneously has a large population and one of the highest rates of growth in the world. This is why it is projected to move up so rapidly in total population. Many unknown factors could alter the above estimate, however. AIDS is one factor that could have a dramatic impact on Nigeria’s future demographics. While AIDS is not the severe national health problem that it is in other sub-Saharan African countries, it is still a problem of grave concern. Nigeria is keenly interested in avoiding that AIDS epidemic that is ravaging countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe. In high incidence countries like these two, 25 percent or more of adults have contracted HIV. While Nigeria does not presently have such high rates of infection, some population forecasts expect that the impact of AIDS will indeed be severe in Nigeria in the coming years. Life expectancy forecasts from the United States Census Bureau predict that Nigeria’s average life expectancy will fall from 53 years in 1998 to 46 years by the year 2010. This predicted decline is not solely based on the impact of AIDS, but AIDS is representative of the health problems that beset countries like Nigeria. Thus, while people in many of the developed countries are living longer on average, many African nations, including Nigeria, are seeing their life expectancies decline. If these trends continue, concerns about rapid population growth may become irrelevant.

Another important aspect of population studies is age. One of the most important points to note is that countries with younger populations tend to have much more rapidly growing populations. This is because more people (women in particular) are in their primary reproductive years (approximately 15-40). Because national populations have different age structures, the rate of natural increase may not always be the best statistic for examining population growth. Fertility rate may be examined instead. The fertility rate refers to the average number of children that a woman will have in her primary childbearing years. In order to get a sense of the age distribution of the population, demographers use what is referred to as a population pyramid. A population pyramid indicates the distribution of a country’s population by age group. The following page from the United States Census Bureau allows you to quickly generate a pyramid for any country of the world. Compare the population pyramids for countries with different pyramid shapes. For example, compare the pyramids for Nigeria, the United States, and Russia. The shape of Nigeria’s population pyramid is representative of many other developing countries. There is a high proportion of the population under the age of 15 and a low percentage of the population over the age of 65. If you were to visit Nigeria, you would immediately recognize that this is a country of children. In a poor country like Nigeria, having such a young population presents several different social and economic challenges. Generally, it is difficult for state and individual families to provide for the material and educational needs of these children. This is the case because young people represent a great proportion of the population relative to economically productive segments of society. Unfortunately, this demographic and economic challenge is often addressed by child labor. Children are often sent to work by their parents as early as age 6 or 7.

Migration is perhaps the one area of population studies that is explicitly geographic. The study of migration examines that characteristics of human movement as well as the underlying reasons for relocation. As with any society, Nigeria is a society that has been and is a society on the move. As will be suggested in this brief summary, however, the dynamics of Nigerian migrations have been strongly dependent upon historical and cultural development. This section examines some of the historical and contemporary dimensions of Nigerian migration. Throughout this discussion one of the key variables to note is the duration of stay. While many migratory movements are conducted on a permanent basis, others are temporary and may be periodic in nature.

This story of migration in "Nigeria" begins in about 1500. This is the approximate beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. In terms of the historical geography of Nigeria, the Atlantic slave trade was a very important period of forced human movement. Initially important in the Niger delta region, the slave trade was also important in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria. From the coastal slave entrepots, mainly African slavers ranged into the surrounding hinterlands to collect their valuable human commodity. With reference to the European slave trade in Africa, it was seldom the case that Europeans rounded up the slaves themselves. In many cases, slaves were captured during conflicts between African states. Indeed, up until the nineteenth century, few Europeans ventured very far inland from the African coast.

The impacts of the slave trade in Nigeria are difficult to assess. Many assert that the contemporary population distribution is directly related to the impacts of the slave trade both internationally and internally. Nigeria’s contemporary regional distribution of population is weighted towards two east-west bands in the extreme northern and southern parts of the country. Many historians and geographers believe that the current population distribution is at least partly influenced by the slave trade. The central "middle belt" region was indeed a major source for slaves for both the coastal trade and trade in the North. In the northern Hausa-Fulani region, the southern Yoruba city-states, and other southern regions, slave raiding and slave ownership actually accelerated in the century after the British outlawed the slave trade. Thus, while the cross-Atlantic trade slowly diminished after 1807, the internal slave trade within "Nigeria" intensified. This process of intensification was particularly harmful for smaller groups who were less able to defend themselves against the armies of larger states. Because of this threat, some of these smaller ethnic groups took refuge in defensive sites. One of the most famous of these nineteenth century refuges is the central Jos Plateau. Many refugees settled in the rocky hills of the Plateau. Partly due to these historic migrations, the Plateau region continues to be one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse parts of Nigeria.

The coming of the British in 1900 marked another turning point in internal migration. Before the British, there was much less freedom of movement within the region. While colonial apologists sometimes exaggerate the freedom of movement that the British brought, it is nonetheless true that the European colonizers did usher in an era of greater human mobility. Before the coming of the whites, there was a fair amount of inter-ethnic conflict and kidnapping for slaves. Given that a substantial amount of inter-group trade existed, however, it would be wrong to conclude that Nigeria’s hundreds of ethnic groups never interacted before the British arrived. Indeed, the Hausa are famous for their far-ranging trade activities. Aside from their role in the trans-Saharan trade, traders in Hausaland ventured long distances to the present-day countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Cameroon. They also migrated to trading centers of the middle belt and other areas further south.

According to Udo, it was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that rural-rural migration became important in much of tropical Africa. Nigeria was no exception. One group of migrants that has been particularly prominent in this type of migration is migrant tenant farmers. Because many villages and ethnic groups have formalized rules about outsiders permanently occupying land, migrants wishing to establish themselves outside of their home area often become tenant farmers. As Nigeria gradually forged itself into a more cohesive country, migrant tenant farming has exhibited several broad changes. First, distance of migration has tended to increase. People are moving further away from their home regions. Second, migrants have tended to become more individualistic and independent in their choice and establishment of new homes. For example, negotiations for land are no longer limited to local elders or chiefs. New migrant farmers often negotiate directly with the holder of use rights. Another important thing to note about Nigeria’s tenant farmers is that they often relocate several times over the course of their lifetime. For most, yearly contracts put them at the mercy of permanent use rights holders. Also, tenant farmers often receive less fertile land that does not produce high agricultural yields.

Another important group of inter-rural migrants are those that respond to changes in urbanization patterns. Indeed, there is often a close interaction between processes of rural-rural migration and rural-urban migration. The city of Lagos and its rural hinterlands provides one example of this interaction: "A city like Lagos has been instrumental in inducing the flow of rural people to the rural areas of Lagos State where they settle to produce various primary products for the Lagos urban market." This phenomenon of population densification around large urban areas is not unique to Nigeria. In the case of Nigeria and other developing countries, however, poor transportation of agricultural products requires less spatial separation between agricultural production and consumption. Other activities that new rural migrants might participate in include firewood collection and charcoal production for the urban market.

Not all migration in Nigeria has been of an economic nature. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s history also includes human dislocation resulting from ethnic conflict. Periodic conflict has sometimes resulted in the movement of minorities back to their home region. The most pronounced case of this ethnic migration occurred in the late 1960s. Before and during the Biafra War of 1967-1970, approximately one million Igbos fled from their homes toward the break-away state of Biafra. This period was also marked by the movement of other Nigerians back to their home ethnic region. Echoing this legacy of ethnic conflict, internal migration is still impeded by formal and informal ethnic discrimination. In most of Nigeria, "strangers" (i.e. those of a minority ethnic group) are discriminated against in areas like employment and education. This is often the case even if a minority person was born in the majority region. For example, even if an Igbo person is born in a Yoruba area, that person is still considered a stranger and not accorded many rights that a Yoruba would receive.

Another important type of internal migration is strongly influenced by environmental factors. Strongly environmental-based migrations can be divided into regular and irregular varieties. Irregular migrations are usually due to periodic environmental hazards. Regular or seasonal migrations occur because of predictable rhythms in physical systems. Seasonal climatic variability is the primary factor in seasonal migrations. Two examples of irregular migrations are the severe droughts that occurred in northern Nigeria in the early 1970s and the early 1980s. Because of crop failure and lack of rangeland and water, thousands of farmers and pastoralists were forced to move southward during these severe droughts. While most of Nigeria’s livestock herders are accustomed to seasonal movement of their herds due to the alternating dry and wet seasons, these two periods of droughts forced many pastoralists to move further south than they would in ordinary years. Indeed, the seasonal movement of pastoralists from the northern part of the country south, is one of the most prominent periodic migrations in Nigeria. Incidentally, the most prominent ethnic group associated with nomadic pastoralism are the Fulani. Another example of seasonal "environmental" migration is widespread in the North. This migration pattern is also associated with the strongly seasonal nature of rainfall in the northern region of Nigeria. While many areas of southern Nigeria grow more than one crop in a year, most of the unirrigated North is restricted to a single crop cycle. Because the dry season is significantly longer in the North, rural peasants often have as many as five or six months where they are not directly engaged in agricultural production. While there are many dry season tasks to complete, some rural people seasonally migrate to major cities to look for work in the dry season. These migrants head for major northern cities like Kano, Katsina, and Kaduna for temporary employment. This short-term migration, usually conducted by younger males, not only supplements the household income earned from farming; dry-season migration also lessens the burden on household grain stocks during the lean dry season. This pattern of migration has a long history in northern Nigeria.

The final major type of internal migration is rural urban migration. This type of migration is addressed in standard number 11 on human settlement. Having discussed some of the characteristics of migration within Nigeria, this summary will close with a look at international migration involving Nigeria.

The most important things to note about international migration is that population flows have historically been out of Nigeria in the post-independence period. Large numbers of Nigeria’s professionals and educated elites have chosen to emigrate since 1960. While this so-called "brain drain" has resulted in the loss of many talented people, international migration to affluent regions like North America and Europe has also resulted in flows of money back to Nigeria. These transfer payments from immigrants to Nigerians at home are referred to as remittances. These payments continue to play an important role in Nigeria’s economy.

Nigeria	3%
World	1.5%
Africa	2.6%
Latin America	1.8%
Asia	1.6%
Australia and Oceania	1.1%
North America	0.6%
Europe	-0.1%

NIGERIA BACKGROUND INFORMATION