Nigeria has a baked-in human capital deficit, and it is one we keep choosing not to fix. Before the numbers, a word on what ‘stunted’ actually means: it is not simply about height. It is chronic malnutrition in early childhood – usually starting before birth and continuing through a child’s first two years – that leaves lasting damage to brain development, immune function, and lifelong earning capacity. Short height is the visible sign; the real cost is mostly invisible and, per current science, largely permanent once that early window has closed. Between 1960 and 2025, an estimated 119 million Nigerians were born stunted by this definition. Roughly 76 million of us are alive today – close to a third of the country. This did not happen by accident. It happened through sixty years of underinvestment in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, across every region, for different reasons at different times.
We hold the world’s second-highest number of stunted children, after India, and the highest burden in Africa. 40% of our children under five are stunted (2023-24 NDHS, up from 37% in 2018), against roughly one in four globally, and only two in ten of our severely malnourished children currently get treated. And we are not doing this against a stable population: we are currently the world’s sixth-largest country, on track for 330 million people by 2040 and over 400 million by 2050 – overtaking the United States to become the world’s third most populous nation, with 60% of us already under 24. Whatever we get wrong now, we are locking in at a scale that grows every year we wait – and the trend is worsening, not improving.
The data, plainly stated: Jigawa: 57%. Kebbi: 54%. Lagos: 13%. No state is below the WHO’s public health crisis threshold of 20%. The Northwest and Northeast carry the heaviest burden by far – not because of who lives there, but because of decades of underinvestment in nutrition, health, and education infrastructure in those states.
Where this is heading: By 2043, on current trends, an estimated 39% of our workforce will carry the effects of childhood stunting. That is not fate. It is the direct, calculable result of choices being made – or not made – right now. Be precise about who this describes: the children stunted today turn 18 between roughly 2039 and 2044. The 2043 workforce and the electorate you will be governing through the mid-2050s are, to a large extent, the same people.
Where this actually starts – before birth, not after: Low birth weight, driven by maternal undernutrition and anemia, carries roughly a threefold higher risk of later stunting; an estimated one in five stunted children was stunted because they were born small. A malnourished mother produces a child already behind before their first feeding. Only 63% of pregnant Nigerian women receive antenatal care, and just 24% begin it in the critical first trimester. An estimated 61% of pregnant Nigerian women are anaemic – a figure close enough to our 40% child-stunting rate to be read as a likely cause of it. Maternal nutrition and earlier antenatal care are cheap next to what they prevent, and they matter before a single child is even born.
Why this cannot wait for infrastructure and cannot come after it: Medical science treats the first 1,000 days – conception to age two – as the window in which stunting can be prevented. After it closes, the damage is considered largely irreversible: some children show catch-up growth in height, but the cognitive effects have repeatedly been shown to persist regardless. A road delayed a decade can still be built. A closed developmental window cannot be reopened for the child who missed it. The economics settle any remaining argument about sequencing: rigorous cost-benefit analysis puts the return on first-1,000-days nutrition spending at roughly $45 for every $1 invested, sometimes far more, against a typical $1.40-$1.50 for large infrastructure projects, when those projects hit their targets at all. There is no honest accounting in which infrastructure gets funded first and nutrition gets what’s left over.
What the science says about ages two to five, and what it means we must build: The first 1,000 days is the window for preventing stunting. But roughly 90% of a child’s brain is formed by age five, and the years from two to five remain critical for language, reasoning, and foundational learning. An estimated 6 million of our roughly 31 million under-five children already risk not reaching their full potential. We also know what works: when carers lead to, talk with, and play with young children, measured developmental readiness more than doubles. That is why this letter asks for more than infant nutrition – it asks for a national early childhood feeding and learning programme, running from infancy through pre-primary school entry, delivered at the only scale that can reach tens of millions of children at once: our school system, built out to serve children years earlier than it currently does.
We ask specifically for one fast, concrete piece of this: containerised, solar-powered daycare and feeding centres attached to every market above a certain size. Most of us who trade for a living already spend our working days at these markets. A facility built into that same space, powered by the sun, not waiting on a grid that has never reliably reached us, lets us feed and educate our children within walking distance of where we already are, instead of choosing between earning today’s income and caring for tomorrow’s workforce.
What is actually at stake, said plainly: every recommendation in this letter is about whether a Nigerian worker in 2043 can compete for the same jobs and investment as a worker anywhere else. China cut its stunting rate from 28.1% to roughly 12% over the same thirty years; our own rate moved from 43.1% back to almost exactly where it started. Kenya’s rate today, 26%, already beats ours, and Kenya is on course to meet targets we are not. We will not flatter ourselves about Rwanda either – its stunting rate is not actually better than ours – but Rwanda has still earned a global reputation for taking human development seriously as a matter of governance, and that seriousness has moved its economy regardless. A workforce where four in ten workers carry the lasting effects of childhood stunting by 2043 does not compete on equal terms with workers from nations that chose differently years ago. That is not a judgement on us. It is what will be true unless this changes.
What it costs: The Institute for Security Studies puts the price of inaction at $412 billion in foregone GDP by 2043. That is nearly a third – 31.7% – of the entire economy we could otherwise have lost to a cause we know how to prevent.
Why that $1.3 trillion figure is not just about roads and minerals: We know Nigeria has lithium, gold, rare earth deposits, and oil still to be extracted, on top of the infrastructure this country is already planning. We say this plainly: none of it gets us to a trillion-dollar economy that means anything without people who can read, learn, and work at their full capacity. today, 92.4% of our children cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10 – one of the worst rates in the world. No economy anywhere near $1 trillion runs on learning outcomes that are broken. We have seen this movie before, at home: decades of oil revenue, with no matching investment in our people, produced a large number and the same poverty. Equatorial Guinea’s oil wealth gave it one of Africa’s highest GDP-per-capita figures and left it near the bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index. Infrastructure and mineral wealth ahead of human capital get us, at best, a bigger GDP sitting next to the same poverty rate we have now – not the country we are asking you to build.
Look at the map we already have. Zamfara and Kebbi sit on our gold belt – and Kebbi has the highest out-of-school children rate in Nigeria (67.6%), Sokoto is second (66.4%), and Zamfara’s literacy rate is among our lowest. Nasarawa, home to our lithium and our first processing plant, is itself a ‘Very High’ stunting state. If we extract without first fixing the schools and clinics sitting on top of these deposits, we will export raw ore and buy back the processed product at a markup – the jobs and the skills base will belong to somewhere else, the way they did with oil, and the insecurity already spreading through Zamfara’s gold fields will spread with it.
A number that belongs to the whole country, not one part of it: Nigeria’s own health surveys show child stunting has held between 37% and 43% in every survey since 1990 – meaning today’s 18-to-40-year-old voters were themselves children through that entire span. Applied to our voting-age population of roughly 118 million, that history plausibly means somewhere between 37 and 50 million voting-age Nigerians alive today were stunted as children. This is not a Northern number or a Southern number. It is a national one, and it has been for over three decades, under every government we have had.
Why this shapes our politics, and why the usual explanation is wrong: It is fashionable to say Nigerians ‘sell’ their votes and blame the electorate for choosing corruption. That gets it backward. Childhood stunting doesn’t make anyone’s reason worse – the global research links it to lower schooling and lower adult earnings, not impaired judgement. World Bank analysis on Nigeria specifically, published in February 2026, found current gaps in nutrition, learning, and skills are on track to cost children born here today roughly half their potential lifetime earnings. The mechanism is poverty, not incapacity: a parent facing real, present hunger will rationally take ?5,000 today over a policy promise for tomorrow, the same way poor voters do everywhere clientelist politics exists. And the rest of us make this worse by disengaging: our national turnout fell from 69% in 2003 to 28.6% in 2023. A paid bloc that could once deliver 2 million votes was 3% of the electorate that showed up; today, that same bloc is over 8%. Mass disengagement doesn’t just hurt our democracy – it hands the outcome to whoever is still mobilising, often with cash, rice, or other short-term inducements. We did not shrink on purpose, but our absence created the vacuum that decides elections for us. We did not create the poverty that makes vote-buying work. The leaders who had sixty years and the resources to invest in nutrition and education chose not to create it. Blaming the people for the predictable consequence of that choice lets the people who made it off the hook. We refuse to keep making that trade on your behalf.
A word for you specifically, since you are who this letter is addressed to: you understand this argument better than most of the country, which raises the obvious question – why does the choice to extract rather than invest persist among exactly the people best positioned to see where it leads? Not because you’ve missed the logic. The gains from a diverted contract land on you, directly and immediately; the cost is spread across everyone else, including people who never had a vote in the decision. And unlike the voter taking ?5,000 because they have no other option, many of you have an exit: the rest of us don’t – private hospitals instead of the public system you helped hollow out, private security instead of policing that has failed, and a foreign passport as insurance against whatever happens here next. That is not a reasoning failure. It is a rational bet that you can outlast the consequences. We are telling you plainly that this is a different choice than the one you accuse the poor of making, and it deserves to be named as what it is.
We would also ask you to sit with this: discounting the future heavily in favour of a certain present payment is not a fixed trait in the people you govern – it is a reasonable response to an environment where your promises have not historically been kept. That environment does not exist on its own. Vote-selling helps produce it, and a government elected mainly on cash and rice owes correspondingly less to any real mandate – which makes the next promise easier to discount too. You cannot fix this only by fixing our poverty. You also have to become the kind of leader whose word is worth believing.
A number that punctures a comfortable assumption: Lagos has this country’s lowest stunting rate – 13%. It would be easy to conclude the crisis barely reaches our commercial capital. It doesn’t. Lagos’s population is so large that its estimated number of affected voting-age residents, roughly 1.15 million, exceeds Anambra’s by more than half a million and outnumbers the affected populations in two dozen higher-rate states. Nowhere in this country gets to consider itself exempt by percentage alone.
The cycle we are still running: 40% of Nigerian children under five are stunted today. A hungry parent cannot adequately feed a child. That child becomes a poor adult. That adult becomes a hungry parent. This is not history. It is happening in real time, in every part of the country, for locally specific reasons – poverty and insecurity in the North, inflation and food-system collapse in parts of the South. A smaller economy from a less healthy workforce means less for everyone – and a shrinking pie is exactly the condition under which we fight harder over what’s left. That is the crabs-in-a-barrel society we have built: too many people fighting over too little, because too few have ever had a genuine way up.
Why the extraction is shortsighted, even for the extractors: A politician who invests in people builds a larger, more capable, more loyal electorate over time. One who extracts from a population kept poor is farming a shrinking base – a strategy with a closing shelf life. We are not speculating that Nigerians would reward the harder choice. In 1955, Obafemi Awolowo funded free education across the Western Region from the region’s own resources, not loans – enrollment went from 381,000 to over a million in seven years. That generation staffed our civil service and universities for decades. His name is on a university. His face is on the ?100 note. That is what investing in people ahead of infrastructure actually builds. It is available to any leader willing to choose it.
That generation of investment – Awo’s and others’ – is part of why we are still standing as one country. We are not Somalia – not yet, and we intend to keep it that way. But a federation held together partly by the human capital past leaders chose to build decades ago is not a federation that can afford another sixty years of the choice going the other way.
A line we must not cross: Racist theories once claimed Black populations were biologically inferior. A large, policy-created stunted population risks being read, wrongly, but dangerously, as evidence for that lie. We owe it to the 76 million, to be precise: this is a policy failure, not a biological one, and it is reversible. Anyone tempted to use this data to diminish any group of Nigerians, by region, ethnicity, or otherwise, is repeating the very error we are trying to correct.
What we are asking of you: Those of us with resources, platforms, and proximity to power built our positions, in part, on an economy that could have looked very different had this investment been made a generation ago. The $412 billion at stake is not an abstraction for policymakers alone – it is the difference between the Nigeria we could build and the one we keep re-choosing by default.
Fund the full window, nutrition and stimulation, infancy through pre-K. Publish the data. Hold the next budget cycle to the target. The bill does not go away by not looking at it, it compounds.