For the first time in a long while, Mr Ben Olayinka and his wife, Esther, have a rare privilege of staying together indoors with their three children for two uninterrupted weeks following the Federal Government’s imposed lock down on Lagos, Ogun and the Federal Capital Territory.
It is indeed an unusual opportunity for the family to bond as Olayinka revealed. Olayinka, who works in Ajah area of Lagos State, goes to work early Monday mornings and returns late on Friday evenings or early on Saturdays, as a way of cutting costs of transportation and to avoid being caught in the chaotic traffic situation in the state.
“Living far apart from ones’ family five days a week comes with its own downside”, Olayinka observed. Apart from having to leave the entire responsibility of raising the children to his wife, bonding with his entire family is also a major challenge.
But with the two-week lock down, Olyinka said “he is indeed making up for the lost time. Being a father and head of a family is far more than being able to provide for one’s family. The emotional attachment should also be there because the woman alone cannot fill the entire vacuum for both parents. This is one of the areas I am paying attention to, at least for now while the stay-at-home directive lasts.”
Although Olayinka would not expressly state how the lock down has afforded him the opportunity to coop up indoor with his wife as they both have nowhere to go, his response to the question on the possibility of having an additional child in about nine months time following the attachment induced by the lock down seemed to be pregnant with meaning. “It won’t be a crime if a new child comes,” was Olayinka’s response.
Since the Federal Government issued the lock down directive in parts of the country, there have been speculations on the possibility of increase in birth rate in the country and indeed in the world, since couples who hitherto seldomly had time for each other, now have the unfettered latitude to stay together for a fairly long period.
Reproductive health experts in Delta State recently expressed concerns that the stay-at-home order in place in some parts of the country would possibly increase intimacy between couples that will ultimately lead to procreation and potential population explosion in the nearest future.
Delta State Technical Support Lead for Family Planning, Dr. Ben Emonene, while expressing this fear, urged couples to play safe to avoid creating another problem while trying to contain the spread of the deadly Coronavirus.
According to Dr Emonena, “there will be an increased bonding between the man and woman with this stay at home directive. Ordinarily when you go to work and come back, there is that natural tiredness that sets in.
“That on its own, is family planning because when you are too tired to even set up to do something that is intimate, there will be no time for that. But now that you are at home full time you are so open to a lot of things to exploit and foremost among that is sexual relation.
“So, if this goes on continuously unprotected, you will find out that in trying to curb this menace of COVID-19 pandemic, we will end up with population explosion.”
A similar view was expressed during a three-day training on media advocacy for family planning organised for journalists, social media influencers and officials of relevant MDAs, held in Abeokuta, Ogun State capital, penultimate weekend.
The training which was organised in conjunction with the Challenge Initiative was aimed at intensifying advocacy efforts by increasing coverage and reportage of family planning, maternal health and adolescent reproductive health issues.
The Programme Director, Development Communications Network, Akin Jimoh, urged participants to use their respective medium to highlight and promote maternal health, adolescent reproductive health and family planning issues at a time like this.
However, there are those who think that Nigerians are unlikely to give in to such temptation this time around. A medical practitioner, Dr Anthony Gbadebo, said the era when Nigerians lived under such illusion and yielded to the temptation of giving birth uncontrollably was gone.
According to him, “the intense advocacy and enlightenment campaigns on reproductive health and family planning are very high in the country now. And this has helped to remove ignorance and other unreasonable sentiment which hitherto acted as obstacles against family planning and birth control. Now, an average Nigerian, irrespective of his level of education and social or religious background, has some information about birth control at the tip of his finger.
“So, I don’t think we are likely to witness baby boom as one of fallouts from Coronavirus lock down. This is not the kind of environment in which people say, ‘let’s bring a child into the world now.’”
An economic expert, Abiodun Sanyaolu also argued that the current economic outlook in the nation does not support such assumption.
According to him, the uncertainty, which hovers over the nation economy will rather make people to either forgo or postpone decisions such as having additional babies.
“As it stands, the entire world is waiting with bated anxiety to see the end of this pandemic to be able to ascertain the level of damage the Coronavirus pandemic had wrought on the world economy because it is bound to affect every strata of our life.
The government, organizations and individuals would definitely have huge prices to pay and this, we cannot ascertain for now until the world succeeds in eradicating the deadly virus,” he stated.
Yet there are those who think the uncertainty occasioned by the outbreak of Coronavirus globally has the tendency to further lower birth rate. This argument is anchored on the fact that fertility is likely to be affected by the prevailing feeling of security in the country.
A case in point, according to them, is the claim by demographers in the United States in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the economic downturn that began in late 2007. A report on the effect of the recession in the country claims that, “fertility dropped substantially. That’s not unusual. That often happens during difficult economic times”. The Sun
