Tag: Malthus

It is not difficult to imagine that the world in which Rev. MALTHUS lived in the closing years of the eighteenth century was radically different from the world that now provides accommodation for us today. In the first instance the population of the world was still thirty years away from reaching the round figure of one billion. But conditions were such that there appeared to be grounds for fearing that available resources would not be available to support growing populations in another few years.

Malthus carried out his seminal work in England in the immediate aftermath of what the world has come to describe as the Industrial Revolution. It was called a revolution because it changed the face of England in the space of a few years to such an extent that a new world had been created. The country was changed from an agricultural country to an industrial world in the blink of an eye. New urban centres were created so rapidly that it seemed that they had simply risen out of the ground and old cities such as London, Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle grew to such an extent as to be unrecognisable for what they were only a few years before. Over in France, a real revolution was raging, raging with such ferocity and abandonment that the king and queen had not only been stripped of their hitherto assumed divine rights but had both been deprived of their royal heads. The king died and there was no replacement as had been the case for hundreds of years. It was clear that a new order had been established in the world, a world in which the poor did not appear to know their place anymore.

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Desperately poor people flocked into towns and cities to such an extent that they appeared to have been taken over and choked with human refuse. They were so poor that their very presence created a serious problem for those who had acquired the capacity to make money under the new circumstances. Their plight has been described in graphic detail by Charles Dickens who himself was slightly brushed by the widely shared condition of poverty which landed him and other members of his family in a debtor’s prison and rushed him into some form of paid employment long before he attained anything close to adulthood. All around him, Malthus observed signs of crushing poverty and impressive fecundity. People who had very little to eat and only rags to save themselves from the charge of immodesty were never shy of producing children all of them born without the expectation of a good life or any life at all. People who were born poor could look forward to a hard life which too often ended on the gallows as there was a long list of crimes which were deemed to be deserving of capital punishment. From the point of view of people like Malthus, the situation appeared to be bleak to the point of hopelessness and intolerable despair and all that was available was the possibility of some form of divine intervention.

Malthus was writing at a point in time when science was in its infancy and at a time when the products of the Industrial Revolution had not yet begun to alleviate human suffering. The poor were warehoused in the most unhygienic conditions within which diseases had a field day, terminating the miserable lives of the people who lived in them with metronomic regularity. At that time science had not yet been developed to a point at which diseases could be associated with microorganisms and so nothing could be done to control the spread of infectious diseases. To Malthus, these diseases had a purpose and that was to control population so that the survivors of cholera, small pox, tuberculosis, diphtheria and other such killers of men could have access to enough food to sustain their lives.

More than two centuries after the publication of the work of Malthus, his fine predictions have not come to pass even though in the meantime, global population has grown more than eight times and it is becoming unlikely that the world will starve to death at any time soon or even in the long foreseeable future. Was Malthus wrong or is there an inbuilt mechanism for ensuring that global population will continue growing ad infinitum? Malthus placed his hope on disease, famine and war to reset the population of the world and in doing so prevent the possibility of human extinction due to severe shortage of food which could lead to utter chaos.

That population could be mercilessly culled by disease had been experienced in Europe, including the Medeaval period in Europe. When the Black death caused by bubonic plague swept through Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, as much as 60% of the population was wiped out within a short period of time showing that pestilence was an efficient means of ensuring that human populations do not grow to such an extent as to overwhelm the supply of food available for keeping individual members of each community alive. . Nobody had any idea as to what was responsible for the diseases which ravaged mankind and ascribed them to inescapable forces of nature which had been designed to more or less keep man in his humble place.  This belief, irrational as it sounds now seems was so strongly held that when Edward Jenner set the world on the path of vaccination, he was viciously attacked and even condemned by powerful people for trying to thwart the will of God. The same treatment and more was reserved for Ignatz Semmeleeis when he advocated that doctors washed their hands with lime after performing autopsies in order to reduce the number of women dying after childbirth. The practice before then was that doctors went from carrying out autopsies to to birthing babies without breaking their stride. Many women died as a result of this practice but conventional wisdom had it that this was the will of God and it was heresy for any man to even think of thwarting it. It was therefore logical for Malthus to think that pandemics were part of the divine strategy for putting a lid on the dangerous growth of human populations.

The other agency which Malthus relied upon to prevent overpopulation was war. It was thought at that time that wars were an integral part of human existence, also a force of nature which led to the continuous harvest of human souls. Wars caused the death of many people in the form of those who were killed in action but more than these, there were those who had to die of starvation brought about by the inevitable famine which was the travelling companion of war. It has to be said that the number of people who died from the interminable little wars of the Malthusian period was miniscule compared to the millions who perished in the big wars which convulsed the world starting from the Napoleonic wars which shook Europe from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napoleon, the outstanding general of the day, did not fight with one hand tied behind his back. He went to war behind a formidable wall of artillery and used his guns to kill his enemies on an early industrial scale. Had Malthus been able to see just a little way into the future he would have placed his faith on the use of war to curtail population growth. War in the twentieth century was killing on a full industrial scale. Modern armaments and munitions together with the contempt for human lives by generals made sure that men died in their thousands within a few minutes. For example the battle of the Somme during World War I claimed the lives of 20,000 British soldiers in the first day of their engagement in that bloody battle. The battle went on for four months during which the British army suffered a million  casualties and gave the name Butcher to Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces at the battle of the Somme and other engagements. Slaughter on that scale was bound to reset human global population but worse was to come at the end of World War II when hundreds of thousands of lives were taken in a matter of seconds at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the end of World War I no less than fifty million lives were lost to the influenza pandemic which had been incubated in the trenches on the Western front and broadcast to all parts of the world by soldiers returning home from the war.

The other agent of population control mentioned by Malthus was famine, not going hand in hand with war but standing alone as a result of inability to produce enough food to satisfy world hunger. There was palpable danger of this at the time Malthus published his work but the danger of this happening receded very quickly afterwards following the discovery of fresh farmlands in several parts of the world especially in the USA to where millions of Europeans escaped throughout the nineteenth century. Together with these new lands, was the widespread use of organic fertilizers originally mined from the guano deposits in Chile and then produced in factories all over the world. The use of fertilisers has led to the multiplication of food production all over the world so much so that the only thing preventing everyone on earth from going to bed with a full belly every night is the toxicity of global politics.

The ability of pestilences such as the Black death to kill humans on a large scale has been tamed by ths relentless advance of medical science which has doubled life expectancy in England from forty years in 1800. This level of astonishing increase has been seen in virtually all parts of the world even though life expectancy in Nigeria today has just crawled past fifty years showing our current vulnerability to disease. It is therefore astonishing that our population has maintained an astonishing growth which is in danger of putting us in what I call the Malthusian trap of population induced misery and even death. People in some other parts of the world have been able to escape from the Malthusian trap through a combination of; medical science, modern food production techniques, real time communication technology, including the growing use of artificial intelligence, sophisticated social infrastructure as well as sensible family planning to reduce that dangerous geometric increase in population that Malthus talked about. Come to think of it, it is apparent that Malthus was speaking to modern day Nigerians all those many years ago. It would be profitable were we to listen carefully to that voice from the past.

In the course of some research into the influenza pandemic which shook the world to its core in the immediate aftermath of World War I, I was a little surprised that the population of Nigeria at that time was only 18 million. Of these, no less than half a million, close to 3%, died in only six months, the short period within which the plague passed through the land and over it. The aftermath of the pandemic was so traumatic that the nation’s economy did not recover to any significant extent until well into the thirties after another global cataclysm which destroyed the world economy had wreaked its own havoc on Nigeria. I was surprised by the small figure of 18 million because that figure is less than the current population of Lagos state and it is dwarfed by the more than 220 million which is touted as the number of Nigerians now alive.

Right from the dawn of history which in any case, is only a little more than ten thousand years ago, polities, right down to the level of villages have always been anxious about the size of their respective  populations if only because the thinking was that there was safety in number as the world was swarming with danger from other polities. And since might was right, everyone was anxious to be on the side of might and right. Many of the most successful conquerors were those who enlarged their territories to such an extent that their exploits are still the subject of interrogation thousands of years after those exploits. The importance of being on the side of the big battalions is shown by the many stories of complete annihilation of populations in virtually all parts of the world by conquerors.

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In the case of the size population of Nigeria, it should not have been surprising that there were only such a number of early Nigerians. After all, Nigeria was in the middle of what was described as the Slave Coast from where millions of people had been extracted and lost to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade over a period of three hunted years. As the slave trade was winding down, at least in the Yoruba country, murderous civil wars did their part in keeping down the population. There was a great deal of unrest in those days and but for the timely and self seeking intervention of the British, the social dislocation within the Yoruba country would have brought about the disintegration of Yoruba civilisation in every sense of the world leading to a cataclysmic reduction in the population. What was happening in the area we now refer to as the South west was mirrored in many other parts of Nigeria. This is why we had only eighteen million people living in Nigeria a hundred years ago. To bring this counting exercise up to date, the estimated population of Nigeria today is in excess of two hundred million, some guesses being as far as two hundred and twenty-three million. In the last hundred years therefore, the population of Nigeria has risen by an astonishing two million people every year and whichever way we look at it, that is an awful lot of people.

The human race has spent about four million years to achieve its present evolutionary status. The journey has been long and complex but we arrived at our present destination some two hundred thousand years ago. In that time we acquired a whole lot of biological characteristics which set us apart from practically all other creatures anywhere on the planet and each of our most distinguishing characteristics gave us even greater advantage over other all the other creatures with which we were part of the universal food chain. Those advantages are so large that we have removed ourselves from the food chain altogether and not only that, acquired an insatiable appetite for all other creatures with whom we share the world so that by our very existence we pose a great threat to the continued existence of all other species on the planet. Take the big cats for example, they now exist anywhere on earth because we allow them to even though there was a time when the fear of any cat above medium size was the epitome of wisdom for man. We were prey to them in the same way that antelopes and other herbivores are still at their mercy. The cats are as physically imposing today as they were all those many years ago but any reflective lion, king of the jungle as he is, knows instinctively that his days are numbered as soon as his interests clash with that of the men with whom he shares the same neighbourhood. Sooner rather than later, the unfortunate lion must remove himself from the premises or face the certainty of sudden, not to say painful death at the hands of his human neighbours. As part of our evolutionary journey we have acquired certain characteristics following from our biological configuration and we have to fit into that stereotype if we are to retain our membership of the human race. It has to be said that not all our adaptations have been painless. Take for example our back. I read somewhere that you are never going to see a quadrupedal animal with a backache for the simple reason that our backbone was designed to be a bridge but our bipedal nature which conferred on us a raft of advantages has forced us to carry our backbone like a tent pole. The strains inherent in this structure means that we almost invariably suffer from backache at certain points in time during our life time and those of us who are not as fortunate as others spend too much time suffering the tortures if the damned from chronic pain somewhere along the length of our otherwise beautiful backbone.

A man anywhere on this beautiful planet has been conditioned to eat three main meals in a day. It is not for any social purpose although man has contrived to make meal times a social event. It is not so much a social event as a biological necessity. A man has to eat for the simple reason that because he eats, he can live and the corollary is no less true. There can be no life without a regular supply of life sustaining food. That brooks no argument and until just over ten thousand years ago, man had to devote all his energy to finding food to eat. He had no time for anything else as he had to move around to find the food with which he kept his body and soul together. Mankind won the jackpot in the lottery of her earthly existence by discovering the science of agriculture which made it possible for him to have his food on tap so to speak. More than ten thousand years after the discovery of agricultural science however food production remains the preoccupation of humans all over the world. All the dazzling civilisations which have ruled in different parts of the world owe all their achievements to coming to terms with and the distribution of food. In other words, each person on earth is a consumer of a broad spectrum of materials and successful societies are those in which the basic needs of her members are more or less guaranteed.

The Nigerian society in 1920, like most societies in almost all other parts of the world was far from sophisticated as it lacked virtually all the artefacts which now make us comfortable and in continuous contact with other parts of the world. I doubt however that in those days, many people went to bed hungry and consequently dispirited. As was the case of most societies of that period, virtually everyone, with the exception of the very young and the very old were actively involved in the process of producing food, mostly for personal or local consumption. There were food shortages at certain times of the year but this was regarded as just being a part of life and endured as such. The society was mostly food sufficient but cash poor and did not suffer from the load of stress which the modern Nigerian has to carry on his head. Government was some distant and powerful entity which extracted taxes from the people but was not really expected to give anything in return. Those who were in school were there by the grace of various, mainly Christian missions which expected and received payment for services rendered. The people rendered onto Caesar what belonged to Caesar and in the main were satisfied with the little that they received in return. God was evidently on his throne and as far as the people were concerned, all was well with the world.

One hundred years later the people bothering to look up to the heavens see nothing but an empty throne as they must feel that they had been abandoned to their fate. They still expect to take three meals everyday but with so many mouths to feed and virtually nothing with which to feed them, many of those mouths are closed with hunger at the end of too many days and there does not appear to be any hope of a redress of the situation anytime soon. With the number of empty mouths chasing dwindling food resources, Nigeria seems to be in the grip of classical Malthusian situation. As far back as 1798, the Reverent Robert Malthus, a historian, statistician and political economist had pointed out that the world was rushing to terminal disaster because the global population was increasing geometrically whereas food production was only increasing arithmetically. With many hungry people, the situation could only be reset by famine in which part of the excess population was killed off, war which was going to achieve the same end or dislocations which were going to do the same thing; that is kill people in their millions. He was careful to point out that his was not a prophecy, but the result of careful scientific investigation. His theory had both supporters and opponents and because more than two hundred years later his prediction had not come to pass, there are many who are prepared to write him off as a false prophet, or more appropriately a failed scientist. There are however several reasons why the Malthusian theory did not deliver on its promises but a good look at this theory suggests that what is happening in the overcrowded Nigeria space is a justification of Malthusian principles. The number of Nigerians looking for their daily bread has grown very large whilst the amount of bread available is small and dwindling all the time. In the meantime there are increasingly brazen reports of terrorism, banditry, kidnapping, regression to barbarism and a display of sheer bloody mindedness from virtually all parts of the country. Already, there is a looming famine casting a cold shadow over the land and with money scarcity being at epidemic level, all the consequences of uncontrolled population growth is making nonsense of the future development of Nigeria. Given this background, it is pertinent at this time to ask if the present situation in Nigeria will prove Malthus right at last.