The Kissinger Report: Declassified U.S. Plan To Control Nigeria’s Population, Resources And How Tinubu Is Helping Finish The Job
West Africa WeeklyAugust 12, 20253 Mins read70 
In 1974, deep inside the corridors of U.S. power, a secret policy paper was drafted that would quietly shape decades of American engagement with Nigeria. Known as the Kissinger Report or National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), it was no ordinary diplomatic note; it was a blueprint.
Commissioned by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the report identified Nigeria as one of 13 key countries whose growing populations and resource wealth had the potential to affect U.S. economic and security interests.
If Nigeria’s people grew too numerous, they might consume too much of their own oil, gas, and mineral resources, which Washington considered essential for its own prosperity.
The report concluded that population control was not just a humanitarian concern; it was a matter of U.S. national security.
At the time, Nigeria’s population was just over 60 million. The report projected rapid growth, a trend it saw not as an achievement of life but as a logistical problem.
Unchecked demographic expansion, it warned, could create instability, divert resources toward domestic needs, and reduce the flow of vital commodities, mainly oil, to the United States.
The solution proposed? Utilise foreign aid, health programmes, and development partnerships to promote fertility reduction and slow population growth in high-risk countries, such as Nigeria.
This wasn’t thoughtfulness. It was resource management, not for Nigeria’s benefit, but for America’s.
The memo touted increased U.S. funding for population-related programmes as both necessary and urgent
Today, the legacy lives on, but with a new, corporate twist.
The Kissinger Report framed foreign assistance as a strategic lever. Aid could be used to encourage population policies, which would involve fewer births and more resources available for export.
Its soft imperialism; disguising resource control as humanitarian outreach, and reducing sovereign nations to the role of resource warehouses for the West.
The plan includes a smaller, weaker Nigeria that is easier to influence, easier to bargain with, and less able to challenge foreign control of its oil, minerals, and markets.
An Investigation by West Africa Weekly reports that Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Pfizer, CIFF, USAID, UNFPA, the World Bank, GAVI, and others are flooding sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria, with long-acting contraceptives like Sayana Press injectables, implants, and IUDs. These are cheap, subsidised, and targeted almost to low- and lower-middle-income African nations.
While branded as empowerment, this is a practice fraught with coercion. Contracts include fertility targets and quotas, and programme design is centralised in Western capitals; African researchers and communities are often sidelined.
They call it ‘choice,’ but the only option they push is long-acting contraception. That’s not a choice. That’s pressure. And again: it’s colonisation through health care. Africans are not driving these programmes, they are driving Africans.
The article also highlights ethical lapses where women are being fitted with IUDs or injectables during emergencies or childbirth, with minimal counselling, education on side effects, or informed consent.
Now, in 2025, Nigeria’s population has surged past 220 million. The youth population is massive, yet unemployment is staggering, inflation is eating away at wages, and the naira is in freefall.
Then, President Bola Tinubu, a puppet, entered, whose regime was never to break this cycle, but to deepen Nigeria in the very vulnerabilities the Kissinger Report counted on.
Tinubu’s swift adoption of subsidy removals and currency devaluation follows the playbook of international financial institutions influenced by U.S. policy. These measures have deepened poverty and destroyed domestic purchasing power, making Nigeria more dependent on foreign loans and trade.
Despite local shortages and refining gaps, crude oil continues to be exported in massive quantities. At the same time, refined fuel is imported at premium prices, keeping Nigeria tethered to global market volatility.
His administration has courted Western oil and gas companies with tax breaks and incentives, even as communities in the Niger Delta suffer from pollution, displacement, and economic neglect.
In effect, Tinubu’s policies are helping Washington and its allies secure the very resource flows the Kissinger Report demanded, while leaving Nigerians to bear the economic fallout.
When Washington framed population growth as a threat, it wasn’t to Nigeria’s development, it was to U.S. consumption.
Under Tinubu, the structural imbalances remain as resources flow out, debt obligations pile up, and domestic capacity remains stunted.
The Kissinger Report’s two central goals, to keep Nigeria politically stable enough to produce resources but economically weak enough to remain dependent, are arguably being fulfilled right now.
And the hypocrisy is glaring. The U.S. celebrates its population growth as an economic strength. Still, it treats Nigeria’s youth bulge as a destabilising danger, especially when those young people demand that their oil wealth benefit them first.
Tinubu’s defenders claim his reforms are painful but necessary. But reforms designed in Washington and rubber-stamped in Abuja have a track record where they deepen dependency, privatise profit, and socialise pain.
The Kissinger Report may be 51 years old, but its worldview is alive, and Nigeria’s value lies in what it can ship out, not in what it can build at home. The risk now is that Tinubu’s alignment with foreign economic dictates will lock Nigeria into another generation of underdevelopment and ensure that Washington’s Cold War-era dream of a compliant, resource-rich Nigeria never dies.
The real threat to Nigeria was never its population growth. It was, and remains, the willingness of its leaders to manage that growth in ways that serve outside powers first.
If Nigeria’s leaders don’t break this pattern, the country’s future will remain a footnote in someone else’s strategy paper.
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