Please do not disappear

Ycan’t help feeling agog – that’s being stopped in your tracks, but not painfully – when you read about South Korea’s birth rate. I should ask you first whether or not you are a dedicated ‘populationist’. I have, of course, allowed myself the geriatric indulgence of introducing new words into the English language; and why not? That one now sits proudly beside ‘esoteria’ and ‘ema’, the latter an entirely appropriate abbreviation to minimise the use of ‘rand’ as money changes hands in Eswatini. On the other hand, if a shop attendant no longer says: “That will be R80 sir,” I will lose the opportunity to say: “May I pay in Emalangeni?” (lol).

I will now get back onto the straight and narrow of seriousness, and share with you an interesting story about global birth rates, especially the dramatically, indeed ominously, falling birth rate in South Korea. Put simply, the ladies of that country are increasingly choosing to not have children; not even one.

Impact

The projected impact of this trend – one that is causing that country’s authorities to treat it as a national emergency – is that in 75 years’ time the population of South Korea will have halved, with 50 per cent of the remaining population being citizens above the age of 65. That’s no joke when you consider the resultant fall in national output from a declining working population, as well as the impact of increasing elderly costs on the public purse.

What is even more amazing is that all the incentives being offered to married couples to have children are largely being ignored. Couples who have children get plenty of cash in the form of monthly handouts to subsidised housing and free taxis. Hospital bills and even IVF treatments (normally costing many thousands of US Dollars) are covered, though only for those who are married. But to little effect.

It’s especially interesting to consider the various views on the motivation behind South Korean women deciding to live without ever having children. One possible reason is that Korean men are not hugely keen on helping with household chores and childcare.

Committed

Now that’s very common throughout the world, but women in most countries submit to that in order to have children. A perhaps more powerful reason is that South Korean women are increasingly committed to their careers and are doing so in a professional climate where maternal absences are viewed as negatively affecting the chances of future promotion. A similarly insecure work feeling is experienced by their men. The extremely generous offer of one year’s paternity leave in the first eight years of a child’s life has been taken up by only seven per cent of the eligible fathers. Perhaps they just don’t want to be doing the dishes (lol).

There is also a prevailing culture of men being superior to women – again an atavistically (I didn’t invent that one) common characteristic in the world. And the gender pay gap in South Korea is the biggest in the OECD countries, while the women are the best educated.

This is not intended as an opportunist criticism of South Korea. They and Taiwan are our friends, and we have a lot of admiration for their profound commitment to hard work and decency. The South Korean economy has grown strongly over the past 50 years. At the same time it has become a very expensive country in which to bring up a child, with huge family spending on supplementary educational support for children. Many women have voiced the view that they wouldn’t want a child to have to go through what they did.

Shocking

It is quite shocking to see the difference between the birth rate of South Korea, which is 0.7 per adult woman, and that of Niger, which is 6.0. The rate to keep a population static in number is 2.1 per woman. Such wide variations have significant regional characteristics. West and Central Africa have an average of 4.8 while Asia and Latin America have around 1.8. Not immediately evident, but a hard reality is that the countries with the highest birth rates also have high poverty levels, which will continue to increase in the absence of robust social welfare programmes; a bigger world population that’s a poorer one. Eswatini’s birth rate is 2.8, which means our population will increase in number. We must achieve robust economic growth and job creation to avoid increasing poverty levels.

Then the question must arise – how do the various people live? The incidence of single parent households across the world is quite an eye-opener, the degree of variance being for different reasons. In the USA the figure is around 25 per cent, in Eswatini it is approximately 49 per cent, yet in Nigeria it is a mere four per cent. The analysis of that must wait for another time. What is a challenging contributor in Eswatini is the cavalier sexual attitude among men and a poor degree of accountability. This is not confined to Eswatini, but in the UK when you are singled out as the alleged father of a child, the DNA test is available quickly and the proven father is paying maintenance for 18 years. That’s what makes the guys behave. In Eswatini our teenage pregnancy figures are especially worrying and all credit and support should go to the recently launched Anti-Teenage Pregnancy campaign, led by KaZondwako’s Reverend Paul Kunene.