THERE must be some expressed concerns about the increasing interest that the Federal Ministry of Health is discovering in contraceptives over more pressing health issues of Nigerians.

Health Minister Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu enunciated some of those issues last November when he addressed the United Nations. He had admitted that malaria, HIV/AIDS, were among the obstacles to Nigeria meeting the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

At another occasion in Addis Ababa, he said “funds allocated to security and the electoral system, among other competing needs in Nigeria, might have robbed the health sector of much-needed higher allocation in the budget.”

On the World Health Day, March 28, Professor Chukwu launched a free contraceptive programme, promising to make contraceptives available at public health centres. We are wondering where this programme ties with the MDGs and the Minister’s concerns with Nigeria meeting them and when it became a priority.

Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, Executive Director of the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, in a lecture in Lagos warned that without an effective primary health care system, Nigeria would not be able to achieve the health components of the MDG.

With these concerns abounding in most discourses about the country’s health, where does Professor Onyebuchi find the resources to distribute free contraceptives when Nigerians are dying of malaria, polio, meningitis and water borne diseases?

The answer lies in the interests of foreign providers of funds for the country’s health programmes. They all have an active interest in controlling Nigeria’s population, not from the supposed health benefits from Nigerians, but out of their fears that a Nigeria that is unable to cater for its peoples may be an unstable environment for natural resources their industries need.

Europe and the United States are also afraid that some of these Nigerians will migrate to their countries if the economic situation of a highly populated Nigeria does not improve.

Professor Friday Okonofua, co-author of a 2009 report on contraceptive use in Nigeria, said, “We are failing Nigerian adolescents when it comes to providing them with the information and services they need to delay marriage and avoid unintended pregnancies.”

The interest in health of Nigerians always clothed as a humanitarian concern however, is more related to the West’s understanding of the implication of demographics in international politics and commerce.

We are surprised at the Minister’s enthusiasm. These demographic interests are not new. In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell stated, “It cannot be expected that the most powerful military nations will sit still while other nations reverse the balance of power by the mere process of breeding.”

If he was not clear enough, a CIA 1977 report put it most succinctly, “World population growth is likely to contribute, directly or indirectly, to domestic upheavals and international conflicts that could adversely affect US interests.

Population growth will also reinforce the politicisation of international economic relations and intensify the drive of (less developed countries) for a re-distribution of wealth and authority in international affairs.”

The Minister should get foreign donors to invest in areas of Nigeria’s health concern, not only population control with contraceptives, whose health implications remain issues for debates in the most developed countries.