A misreading of Islam led to Niger’s explosive birth rate, hampering the country’s fight to adapt to the climate crisis and preserve its shrinking resources, the country’s president has said.
This nexus of issues is likely to have an increasingly direct impact on European politics, said Mahamadou Issoufou, who warned warned that migration may exceed the levels it reached during the second world war.
“Everything is connected in a global village. As they say, a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and there can be a tornado in Houston,” said Issoufou, who has been feted by Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel as one of Africa’s most articulate leaders.
Issoufou claims he has been slowly driving down his country’s birth rate of more than seven children per woman, the highest birth rate in the world for the past decade.