*Photo:Kemi Adeosun*
Every language has words that travel. Wahala needed no translation when it crossed from Yoruba into Nigerian English and then into global consciousness. Everyone knows what wahala is. You need no dictionary. You need only to have lived.
Bukata is wahala’s quieter cousin. Less dramatic, more structural. Where wahala announces itself — the crashed deal, the relative who arrives unannounced with six children and no plan — bukata simply sits down at the table and eats. Every day. Without apology.
The word comes from the Hausa bùƙātā: personal business, obligation. It crossed into and somewhere in that crossing it acquired depth. In everyday Nigerian speech, bukata is the thing that has a claim on you before you have a claim on yourself. The school fees that land before the salary. The hospital bill for a family member that was not in any budget. The younger brother whose JAMB fees you did not plan for but will pay, because you are the one who made it. Bukata is not an emergency. It is a condition.
I want to talk about bukata today not as a cultural burden or a moral virtue, but as an economic indicator. A number. Economists call it the dependency ratio. I have decided it should simply be renamed: the bukata index. Because that is what it measures — not abstractly, not in a textbook, but in the lived mathematics of Nigerian life.
The Number Behind the Word
The dependency ratio counts children under fifteen and adults over sixty-four, sets them against the working-age population, and expresses the result as a percentage. Nigeria’s stands at approximately 77% in 2025, according to the World Bank. For every 100 Nigerians of working age, 77 people — almost all of them children — need to be supported by those 100. The global average is 58%. We are carrying nearly a third more bukata than the rest of the world.
For every 100 Nigerians of working age, there are 77 dependents. The global average is 58. We are not just carrying more — we are carrying structurally more. And that weight has a name everyone already knows.
That number is the explanation for things you already know: why the salary disappears before the month ends. Why the savings account never quite fills. Why many Nigerians are not building wealth so much as managing obligations.
This is not a cultural complaint. It is an economic fact with consequences that run far deeper than any individual household. High dependency means thin savings. Thin savings means a shallow pool of loanable capital. It is not that Nigerians do not save. It is that the savings do not reach the formal system in a form that banks can lend from. The CBN’s Monetary Policy Rate sitting stubbornly at 27% is, in part, the dependency ratio made numerical. (Charlie Robertson’s must-read book The Time-Traveling Economist points to the statistical connection between low interest rates and lower fertility.) It’s worth the read if you can find a copy.
The Countries That Escaped — and How
This is not a permanent condition. It is a stage. And the evidence for what lies on the other side of it — if the right decisions are made — is available in plain sight.
The South Korean case deserves a sentence beyond the table. Its starting point was, in several respects, not unlike Nigeria’s today: fertility above six, dependency above 80%, income among the lowest in Asia. What changed was deliberate policy — a national family planning programme from 1962, serious investment in girls’ education, and the industrial jobs that gave young people something to work toward. The demographic dividend that followed is estimated to account for between a third and half of the entire East Asian economic miracle.
Bangladesh matters because it removes the excuse of poverty. It made the same transition while still a low-income country, through outreach and political will rather than wealth. Mauritius, though small, matters because it happened on this continent, following identical sequencing: fewer dependents, more savings, cheaper capital, faster growth.
What We Can Do
There is a version of this argument that reads as a counsel of despair — if the dependency ratio is structural, what can policy do? The answer, from every country that has navigated this, is: more than you think, faster than you expect, if you start with the right things.
Girls staying in school is not a social policy that happens to have economic side effects. It is monetary policy by another name. Every additional year of female education is associated, in the data, with meaningful reductions in fertility. Accessible family planning is not a health intervention. It is a direct input into the national savings rate and, through the savings rate, into the cost of credit. Female workforce participation is the mechanism by which households gain the economic breathing room to make different calculations about family size.
None of this requires waiting for oil prices to cooperate, or the power sector to reform first, or the tax architecture to simplify. The demographic transition is its own agenda. It runs in parallel with everything else. And unlike most of Nigeria’s structural challenges, it has a clear, validated playbook — tested across multiple continents, at different income levels, under different political systems.
The dependency ratio has been falling in Nigeria — slowly. From above 90% in 2012 to 77% today. The direction is right. The pace is not. Policy can accelerate it. South Korea did not wait for the transition to happen to it. It decided the transition was urgent, and acted accordingly.
The Bukata Economy
I began with a word because the word does work the statistic alone cannot. The dependency ratio is rigorous and important. But bukata is what it feels like to be inside it. It is the working Nigerian who is not poor but is not free — whose income is real but whose savings are theoretical, whose ambitions are intact but whose capacity to pursue them is perpetually pre-empted by the legitimate needs of people they love.
The economist sees 77% and identifies a structural constraint on capital formation. The working Nigerian sees the same number and sees their month. Their family WhatsApp group. The list that must be paid before anything can be put away.
Both are right. The insight is that they are describing the same thing. And naming that connection — between the private weight we call bukata and the public constraint we call the dependency ratio — is the first step toward building the political will to change it.
The change is possible. The countries that have made it are not mythological. They faced versions of the same arithmetic Nigeria faces today and decided, deliberately, to act.
Bukata is real. It is also temporary — but only if we treat it that way.
– Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.