Countrymen and women, loyalists and opponents,

I was very glad to read somewhere last week that contraceptive usage in Our Country has increased, resulting in a reduction in the fertility rate. It was welcome news indeed. But I think a lot more remains to be done. There is still a very large segment of our population which does not patronize contraceptives. Research shows that those who do not use contraceptives outnumber those who use contraceptives. What this means is that a lot of our citizens are indulging in serious ?bedmatics? without factoring in the simple formula that the addition of a contraceptive will help avert an unrestrained multiplication of our population.

So even though the fertility rate (which is the average number of children a woman in a particular geographic area is likely to bear in her lifetime) is said to be reducing, our population growth rate remains very high. We simply have more mouths than we can feed in this country. The national cake is too small to be shared by so many people. Over the past two decades, several campaigns have been run to educate our citizens to use contraceptives to manage their fertility and thereby help to control the population growth rate in our country. Alas, you don?t need Malthus to tell you that these campaigns have not yielded any significant results.