Legal Practitioner calls for population control

Legal Practitioner calls for population control 

BY ASSAM ABIA

Barrister Vincent U. Essen, a caucus member of the All Progressive Congress, APC, Akwa Ibom State has called on the Federal Government to as a matter of urgency, check population explosion in Nigeria. 

Essien, in a press briefing in Eket, Akwa Ibom State, over the weekend, said that the country’s population was growing in a very alarming rate against the available resources and that if not urgently checked, the country may find itself groaning for food sufficiency and economic survival. 

He averred that Nigeria will in the next decade become the third most populous nation in the world after China and India, a situation he said will bring untold hardship to its citizenry, if proper planning is not done now. 

“We can never get it right if our economic planners do not consider the geometrical rise in our population vis-a-vis available resources and future projections”

“The Federal Government should as a matter of urgency formulate policies that will check population explosion through birth control and incentives to family planning, as was done in China some years ago”, Essien said. 

He said that the Country’s population is leaving behind all indices of economic growth because of failure in the power sector. 

Electricity he said was the bane of Nigeria’s economic growth, adding that if the Country had sufficient and constant power supply, industrial stability would have brought about economic development to mitigate the alarming population growth. 

“The only way out of the present electricity challenges facing the Country was to break up the national grid and create independent power generating stations in every State of the Federation”, he opined, adding that the idea was a form of physical restructuring of the Country which the All Progressive Congress, APC has always advocated for. 

Barrister Essien called on President Muhammadu Buhari to use the next four years of his administration in addressing the nagging issue of electricity failure in the Country, stressing that all other indices of economic growth will fall in place with the availability of constant power supply. 

“Nigeria has the needed human and natural resources to be great but policy implementation has been our major problem, we must get it right, yes we can”, he said. 

On the just concluded general elections in the Country, Essien said that there was tremendous improvement compered to the 2015 general elections and that INEC has learnt from some shortcomings which included logistics and voter education, while scoring the Commission high in its performance.