I remember that day in 2011 when world population was said to have hit 7 billion. I was passing the lobby of the Transcorp Hilton Hotel and the TV at the reception was on BBC Channel. I paused to listen to the momentous news before moving on to the nearby bank. The BBC reporter was in Accra’s Agbogbloshie market, and the camera would zoom in and out on black pregnant women as the reporter ran commentary about how the world population had exploded and all the dangers that came with that. I found it very distasteful that they would choose to locate their news coverage in Africa and then focus on pregnant black women. The general gist that the BBC was silently passing across to the world was that black people were the ones populating the world indiscriminately.
Nigeria is the biggest culprit in Africa, and these days, we put our population at around 220 million. Nigeria’s population growth rate is put at around 2.6% – 3%, and the other day some global body put out…