More Nigerians than Americans by 2050

Give it 37 years and Nigeria’s population will be greater than that of the United States, according to a United Nations report, ‘World Population Prospects: the 2012 revision’ published last week. By the end of the century (2100) Nigeria could even be the world’s third largest country by population, according to the UN.

By 2025, says the report, the world’s population will reach 8.1 billion, up from the current 7.2 billion, and clime to 9.5 billion by 2050 and 11 billion by 2100.

AFRICA’S POPULATION SET TO DOUBLE BY 2050

The UN report also predicts that more than half the growth in population up to 2050 will occur in Africa with a possible doubling of the number of people living on the continent from today’s 1.1 billion to 2.4 billion in the mid century.

By 2100, says the report, 35 per cent of the world’s population could be living in Africa, about 4.2 billion people.

Some of the biggest increases in population will be in the world’s most undeveloped countries, including Zambia, Tanzania, Somalia, Niger and Mali.

NIGERIANS ARE ALREADY OPENING THE CHAMPAGNE

The Kenya Forum has addressed before whether the growth in Africa’s population is anything to worry about (see ‘What on earth are we going to do with seven billion people?’, 1 Nov. 2011) but some people might be popping the champagne corks in celebration at the prospect of their growing market.

New figures just released show that Nigerians consume more champagne than just about anyone else in Africa, with sales expected to increase to 1.1 million litres by 2017. In 2011 Nigerians drank $50 million of the bubbly luxury.

The figures are from research undertaken by Euromonitor which suggest that the growth in champagne consumption in Nigeria is second only to that in France, where of course champagne comes from.

NIGERIA’S ELITE GOES POP POP POP

Nigerians love their champagne so much they even sing about it. One pop song, for instance, runs, “We dey pop champagne, pop pop pop pop pop, pop champagne!” and is a big hit in nightclubs where men holding bottles of the bubbly bounce around with women holding glasses full of the elixir.

Pop pop pop in Nigeria…

Euromonitor’s Spiros Malandrakis (surely one of the few Greeks to be drinking champagne at the moment) said: “Champagne has its own demographic on the higher end of things – it’s not even about the middle class, it’s about elite”.

“People may find it surprising that Nigeria came second in the rankings, but it has an extremely extravagant elite, with Nollywood and the oil industry”.

AND IN KENYA…

With starting prices at Sh6,000 a bottle in the shops and much more in nightclubs, the Kenya Forum thinks it might be some time before Kenyans can buy too much of the bubbly, let alone risk spilling any on the dance floor, except, of course, for some of our MPs! Pop pop pop.