By Obadiah Mailafia

I HAVE always lamented the fact that Africans are the last people to ever plan for their collective future. In a manner of speaking, the future is already with us through the phenomenon that futurologists term “global megatrends”. These are long-term ubiquitous, structural and often irreversible transformations that shape economies and societies. By their very nature, they have the present and future capacity to “disrupt and reshape the world in which we live in surprising and unexpected ways”. This also means that public policies that normally operate within short-term horizons need to be designed in terms of more long-term, systems-based approaches to cope with structural societal changes. In this sense, long-term perspective planning, including scenario analytics, are often better suited to managing these large-scale transformations than traditional linear-based public policy systems.

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One of the great megatrends reshaping our world is demographics.  The world population has already attained the seven billion mark. It is forecast to reach the 10 billion mark by 2050. The coming decade will see a greater trend towards rising population in the developing world, while in the advanced industrial economies, the trend will be that of demographic decline. Indeed, countries like Japan, Russia and Germany are already facing the prospects of falling population. By 2030 the number of people older than 65 is set to double to about 1 billion. While today the population of those aged 65 and above is eight percent of the global population, that figure will increase to 13 percent in the coming decade. A major factor in these population changes is the declining rate of fertility in the Asia Pacific and the advanced industrial countries.

As current trends go, some 90 percent of the youth population resides in the developing countries. This has profound implications for employment-generation strategies in both rich and poor countries. For the countries with dwindling demographics, public pension systems will come increasingly under pressure while public healthcare spending is bound to increase. There will also be great risk of viral epidemics defying national borders, as happened recently with Ebola in West Africa. For countries with youth bulges such as those of Africa, policies will have to adopted to accelerate human capital development and for strategies to boost industrial development and jobs.

In 2010 the world’s middle class population stood at 27 percent. By 2030 it is forecast to reach the 60 percent mark. Of this, 80 percent will reside in the developing countries, with all the implications for global business and world markets. These changing demographics will mean a considerable boost in global aggregate demand and significant expansion in wealth and economic opportunities. Demand for power, food and natural resources will increase astronomically. Ironically, expanding opportunities will also mean rising inequalities and deepening poverty in those pockets of the world where diminishing expectations are structurally embedded in path-dependent economic systems.

As the population of older people increases in rich and poor countries, there will be more concern about health issues. Health services will have to be expanded to cope with a larger volume of demand. At the same time, a richer and more expanding middle class will give greater concern about ethical moral issues in consumption. More and more people will seek higher-value needs as described in Abraham Maslow’s famous theory of the hierarchy of needs. For Nigeria in particular, our population is set to dramatically increase from the current 200 million to about 410 million people in 2050, ahead of the USA and only behind India and China.

There are some foreign “experts” that are not at comfortable with Nigeria’s exponential population growth. Their motives are often more sinister than enlightened. During the trans-Atlantic slave trade that lasted more than 300 years, a quarter of Africa’s population was virtually decimated. We, therefore, need some kind of demographic re-balancing going forward. The optimal size of Nigeria’s population, in my view, should be 500 million. When we reach 500 million, that would be the time to begin to think in terms of some form of population control. We need an optimal population size linked to economic growth and technological advancement to achieve world power status, which is our destiny.

The key challenge is to plan for the forthcoming population growth while investing in skills and infrastructures. We must expand the economy and expand job opportunities for our young people, otherwise we would face a nightmare scenario. Linked to demographics is accelerating urbanisation. One of the major megatrends in the coming decades is rapid urbanisation. In 1950 some 30 percent of the world’s population lived in urban cities. According to forecasts, some 66 percent of the world’s population will live in cities in 2030. In the case of developing countries such as those of Africa, rapid urbanisation is the norm, but by 2030 urban dwellers are likely to constitute merely around 50 percent, up from the current average of 30 percent. In the advanced nations of Europe, the trend is likely to exceed 70 percent.

A remarkable trend in the urbanisation process is the phenomenon of megacities, defined as cities with more than 10 million people. According to some forecasts, by 2030 the population of some cities will rise substantially: Delhi (36 million), Shanghai (30 million), Mumbai (27.8 million), Tokyo (27 million), Karachi (24.8 million, Cairo (24.5 million), Lagos (24.2 million), Sao Paulo (23.8 million), Kinshasa (20 million). A new form of urban agglomeration is emerging, known as gigacities, i.e. super cities exceeding 50 million dwellers. For example, the Chinese government is said to be planning to connect five cities into a massive urban conurbation, such that Greater Shanghai could exceed 170 million in the next five years.

One significant fact for global trade and investments is that megacities are vortices for business, money and capital. They will have a capacity to wield economic power well beyond their national frontiers. Several of those cities have a GDP higher than many countries. New York’s economy stands above a US$1.5 trillion while that of London is US$845 billion. At US$136 billion, the GDP of Lagos is significantly higher than that of Ghana at US$ 45 billion and Côte d’Ivoire at US$38.37 billion.

The acceleration of urbanisation will push demand for greater infrastructure, housing and public social facilities such as education, health and public transport. The challenges of pollution, floods and other urban problems will also intensify. Governments will have to design urban management solutions that will enable the new megacities to flourish; otherwise, they will be dens of iniquity and strife, with all the implications for governance, security and social stability.

The new thinking about urbanisation centres on creation of “smart cities” that are innovative and creative. Drones will be used to carry messages from one part of town to another. Waste disposal networks by way of tubes will carry wastes from building to building into recycling plants for production of biogas. Driverless cars and buses will gain increasing acceptability while maglev subways will become one of the popular means of transport.  But there will be substantial differences in the demographic mix of the megacities. In Asia, the population of over 60 will outnumber the young while in Africa it will be the opposite.

The implications for Nigeria are onerous. In the coming decades the majority of our people will live in cities. We must, therefore, go back to the discipline of urban and regional planning. We must expand urban infrastructure, including trams, subways sanitation and social services. We must create a built environment that is sound, safe, sustainable and air-conditioned. We need to build nothing less than a new civilisation on our continent.

Vanguard