ABUJA – Jhpiego Country Director in Nigeria, Prof. Emmanuel Otolorin, has blamed Nigeria’s insurgency on imbalance between demand and supply due to lack of family planning.
Otolorin made this known to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Tuesday in Abuja.
Jhpiego is an international, non-profit health organisation that deals with health related issues.
He said that a lot of families gave birth to number of children they were unable to cater for.
Otolorin explained that at the long run, these children were sent out to be begging on the streets, thereby indulging in various degrees of crime out of frustration, poverty and hopelessness.
He said that in the process of begging, they started to experience frustration and getting into crimes, including insurgency, to earn their daily bread.
According to him, no child that is well groomed and catered for by parents will find his or herself on the streets begging or indulging in any kind of crime.
Otolorin, however, appealed to the government to address the country’s population by making family planning accessible to mothers and intensify its efforts at enlightening them on its benefits.
“Nigerian population is growing at a very fast rate and most importantly is growing faster than most of our social services are also growing.
“The end result is that we have an imbalance between demand and supply for most of the social amenities in the country.
“For example, there are inadequate schools, teachers, health workers, facilities, water and electricity; all these things are creating a big high demand.
“Unemployment is at a very high level particularly for young people,’’ he said.
“If we do not pay attention to our population, we will never improve the quality of lives.
“To improve the quality of lives we need to address our population, the best way to do this is to encourage people to use family planning,’’ Otolorin added.
According to him, with such measure, quality of life will improve through the creation of more jobs, establishment of more schools with adequate teachers and improved infrastructure.
He, however, assured that it would guarantee the nation of its chances of becoming one of the 20 most developed countries by 2020.
Jhpiego, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, has been in Nigeria since 1970, strengthening the pre-service education in medical and nursing colleges updating knowledge and skills of health workers.
Its activities in the country included malaria in pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, emergency obstetric and neonatal care, and postpartum family planning. (NAN)
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