Antinatalists: Finally, threat to population growth, future is here As voices of youths questioning parenthood rise

 Antinatalists: Finally, threat to population growth, future is here

As voices of youths questioning parenthood rise

In a society where children are often seen as blessings, insurance policies, and symbols of divine favour, a quiet shift is underway, particularly among urban youths who believe economic strain, social pressures, and shifting personal values are leading them to question the expectation to bear children. IFEDAYO OGUNYEMI reports on this rethink towards reproduction and the tensions it sparks across generations, religions, and regional divides in the country.

TWENTY NINE-YEAR-OLD Aderonke Olajide grew up in a family of six children. Her widowed mother, a primary school teacher, often juggled loans to keep the house running. Now, standing on her own feet, Olajide says she has no plans to marry or bear children.

“Children are blessings,” she says with a slight smile, “but they are also bills.”

The human resource assistant at an Osogbo-based foundation said, “I love kids. But I can barely afford to take care of myself. I look at school fees, food prices, rent, the instability… and I ask, what kind of life will I be bringing a child into?”

Olajide is not alone in this conundrum. Across cities and towns in Nigeria, a subtle but growing current of thought is challenging the age-old logic that one must “marry and multiply.”

This movement, often couched in economic frustration, feminism, climate awareness and even quiet rebellion, is rethinking the role of procreation in Nigerian society, particularly at a time many believe the country’s population has exploded beyond control. As of 2023, the World Health Organisation (WHO) put Nigeria’s population at 227,882,945, with a projected increase of 58% to 359,185,556 by 2050.

In 2024, Nigeria’s inflation surged past 30% [but the rebasing of Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) shot it down to 24% by June 2025], with the cost of basic food staples doubling in less than two years.

For many years now, school fees in private and public institutions keep skyrocketing as house rent in urban hubs like Ibadan, Lagos, Kano, Abuja, and Port Harcourt continues to climb, often beyond the monthly salary of average workers.

This explosion has caused many Nigerians to rethink their commitment to the future in the face of scarce economic resources.

For 33-year-old Kingsley Ude, a tech worker based in Lagos, fatherhood is “a future I’m not sure I can afford.”

“My parents raised five kids with one civil service salary,” he said. “Today, even two working adults can barely fund one child’s full education without getting into debt.”

Ude’s concerns are echoed by many millennials and Gen Z Nigerians who now see having children not as a duty, but as a luxury, one that many are unwilling to stretch for in a country where jobs are scarce, healthcare is poor, and the future is uncertain.

Children as ‘pension’ plans?

In Nigeria’s traditional socio-economic framework, children are considered the family’s retirement plan. A 2024 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that despite the adoption of an antenatal demographic transition model in sub-Saharan Africa, population growth continues to soar in the region. The study also averred that parental pressure, the desire for more children, the desire for male children, values placed on children, norms, and pronatalist culture were associated with high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa.

Based on this thought, children born in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, are meant to grow, earn, and eventually provide for ageing parents, as the saying goes in the streets. Some even help out their parents in their business or farm from a young age. One vivid example is the story of an 11-year-old girl seen in a viral intervention video made by an activist Adetoun Onajobi, popularly known as Just Adetoun. The unnamed girl was seen helping her mother sweep on the street in Lagos Island around 3 a.m. earlier this year, a move many described as child labour.

That revelation is the situation for many children in the country. The founder and CEO of Romeo and Zainab Boudib Foundation (ROMZAIB), Dr. Halimah Nuhu Sanda, explains it better in an Op-Ed.

“The high rate of population increase is also placing more stress on families, some of whom are increasingly finding it hard to survive. Large families are the order of the day in the North of Nigeria, where each family averages six to seven children according to the National Population Commission.

“Though kids are generally thought of as an economic resource—assisting in farm work or small enterprises—the cost of education can be prohibitively expensive for poor families. Hence, parents are forced to choose between sending their children to school or keeping them at home to contribute to family income. This economic restriction disproportionately affects girls, who are most often the first to be removed from school when there are shortages,” she said.

The model that children are meant to grow old to help their parents is also crumbling, according to a Nasarawa-based sociologist, Dr Lawan Musa.

“With economic hardship and mass youth unemployment, many young adults can’t even support themselves, let alone their parents,” he said in a short response to Sunday Tribune’s WhatsApp request for comments. “The generational cycle of expectations is broken.”

Family, societal pushbacks

Meanwhile, public conversations about parenting and reproduction often centre on women. From Nollywood scripts to religious pulpits, the idea is that a woman is not complete without bearing children.

But increasingly, Nigerian women are pushing back. Those pushing back publicly most consist of feminists who regard motherhood as a choice and not an obligation. Many also hinge the belief on the fact that many mothers endured marriage and motherhood just to save face and not become a public ridicule.

“Women do not want to be forced into the motherhood/caregiver stereotype,” OikehJoy, a feminist posted on X. [Many] women don’t want children nor want to become the heart of a home. We want to be whatever we want to be.”

These choices, however, are not always respected, especially by older generations.

When 27-year-old Cynthia (not real name) told her parents of Igbo descent but based in Benue State that she was not interested in having children, they called an emergency family meeting.

“They told me it was selfish, that I was denying my bloodline and my duty to God (being an Igbo girl who was brought up as a Catholic),” she recounted. “But I asked them how they expect such a family to progress with the state of things in the country.”

Cynthia, who is between jobs, had to relocate to Lagos to be free from the family pressure. She told the Sunday Tribune that even if she eventually gets married, it will be to a partner who does not have an issue with being child-free.

While similar conversations sometimes happen in isolation, they also happen during discourses on overpopulation or depopulation. One such discussion was started by Joseph Brendan on Saturday, July 26, 2025 on X/Twitter.

Tweeting from @Joe_brendan_, Brendan raised the issue of overpopulation, but the tweet drew divisive comments from the tweeps, many of whom countered the idea that the country is overpopulated because much of its landmass is largely underutilised or unused.

“Another truth that Nigerians need to start living with early is [that] we are becoming too much for our land size as a country. Nigeria, as a country, is too small in size for 200 million people. Vertical urbanisation should start kicking in with full effect,” Brendan said in the tweet that has now gathered over 300,000 views and hundreds of engagements.

North-South fertility divide

While discussions around voluntary childlessness and antinatalism are growing in urban southern Nigeria, northern regions still largely uphold high fertility as a social norm. According to data from the 2021 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) cited by Statisense, the fertility rate or the average number of children per woman in Jigawa, Katsina, Kebbi, Bauchi, Kano, and Yobe is between 7.6 and 6.1, unlike in Lagos or Ogun, where it is less than 4.

In the North, large families are seen as a sign of wealth, masculinity, and religious fulfilment, with many women often marrying young with little access to family planning. Only in the urban centres where many educated women reside that they delay childbirth or space their children.

Commenting on this phenomenon in a long and distressing post last August, former presidential aide, Reno Omokri, said that in one generation, Nigeria’s population has multiplied by five while its landmass and resources have not only failed to multiply by five but have also reduced due to desertification, erosion, and deforestation. He stated this while comparing Nigeria and the United Kingdom’s population figures between 1960 and 2024.

“That is the main cause of the present economic and social challenges facing the nation and especially Northern Nigeria. Most of Nigeria’s population explosion comes from the North. From the latest UNFPA data, Northern Nigeria is growing at twice the rate of Southern Nigeria.

“Population control is a taboo subject in Northern Nigeria. Anybody who mentions it can quickly become a political pariah. Politicians and religious figures will weaponise such counsel and term it as anti-North. But without it, the challenges the North is facing will only grow worse,” Omokri said on X.

Adding complexity to Nigeria’s population debate is the introduction of GMO seeds and family planning projects funded by international bodies like the Gates Foundation. While some see these efforts as practical tools to reduce hunger and support reproductive health, others view them with suspicion with their tendency to affect population growth.

One such divisive conversation took place on X during the week when medical doctor and digital health advocate, Dr. Chinonso Egemba, popularly known as Aproko Doctor, made a video many think promotes GMO seeds and has since come under heavy backlash from Nigerians on social media.

Growing antinatalist communities

While rhetoric like this appears to be altruistic for anyone on both sides of the population control discussion, many believe it feeds into the narrative of antinatalism, a philosophical position that argues against procreation. Some antinatalists see population control/reduction as an ethical stance to prevent human suffering, others, however, link it to environmental sustainability or personal autonomy.

While not yet mainstream in Nigeria, the ideology is gaining subtle traction among youth disenchanted by economic, ecological, and social instability. A quiet but growing number of them are taking these frustrations online into Reddit threads, Telegram groups, closed Facebook forums and YouTube channels where antinatalist ideals are openly discussed.

A common theme is a shared belief that bringing a child into a broken world is not just a burden, but largely unethical.

Two of those are Matthew [who had been an antinatalist since childhood] and Daniel, who were interviewed about antinatalism in Nigeria by UK-based Lawrence Anton in a YouTube video, entitled “Antinatalism in Nigeria | Matthew & Daniel,” which was seen by the Sunday Tribune.

In another video entitled “Antinatalism – Make the world better by not reproducing,” another Nigerian, Kuffy Eyo, discussed reasons behind her desire to remain childless. Some of the reasons she listed include climate concerns and overpopulation. “Just think about diapers, for example, a child uses hundreds of them in the first two years of their life. I don’t want to get riled up about that.”

“Another reason people don’t want to have children is that this life is not even great. And I don’t know why many people who have realised this still want to have children. That ties back to selfish interests. Are they trying to procreate so that they can feel better about life?” Eyo queried.

Religion, however, remains a powerful counterforce. Many antinatalist-leaning Nigerians speak of internal conflicts between their beliefs and their upbringing.

“My mom keeps saying, ‘be fruitful and multiply,’” says a woman in her mid- to late-twenties, who craved anonymity. “But I read Genesis with new eyes now. Maybe God also meant multiply wisdom, not just bodies.”

Though religious leaders continue to preach fertility as divine instruction, often equating childlessness with a curse, the quiet resistance persists, especially among Nigeria’s digitally literate and ideologically curious youth.

“We talk about planting trees and going green,” she said, “but we don’t talk about overpopulation as an environmental problem. Fewer children mean fewer emissions, less pressure on land, water, and food. I don’t hate children, but I don’t owe the world a womb. That should be okay.”

She also believed empowering women with choices is key to climate resilience, saying, “Letting women choose if or when to reproduce can be the most sustainable policy we adopt.”