A Study of Recent Social Change in Rural Nigeria

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Nigeria has experienced unprecedented economic ups and downs since 1970. She attained remarkable economic growth in the 1970's, but she has experienced sharp depression since the end of the 1970's. The rapid growth of oil exports was the main propellant of economic growth in the 1970's and the repercussions of the world oil market-glut were the main cause of the depression. The former is called “oil-boom” and the latter is called “oil-doom” in Nigeria. The sharp fluctuations in economy had an influence on the most of Nigerian society. Even farmers who lived in rural areas could not escape from the influence of this economic change.In this paper, the author has tried to analyze the effect of national level economic change on the rural society by depicting the changing feautures of a rural village. There are many aspects to this problem but it was only possible to study labour migration and problem related aspects in the field survey. As to labour migration studies, a considerable number of studies have been done already in West Africa. There seem to be several opposing approaches, such as the methodological individualist approach, the neo-classical economists' appoach, the structural-functionalism approach, and the Marxist approach. To avoid the pitfalls of the individualist and neo-classical approaches, and to avoid the hasty generalizations which the structural approach and some of the Marxist approaches are apt wake, the author tried to analyze the history of individual labour migration related to the history of households.The field survey was carried out in 1985 at a rural village called Ebiya in the Kwara State of Nigeria. It shows that both the “oil-boom” in 1970's and the “oil-doom” after the end of 1970's had serious effects upon rural society. The ways of adaptation or resistance by Ebiya people show a wide range of diversity. People of farming families were late pushing themselves into the non-agricultural sector, and people of families, the head of which were teachers or civil servants, were prompt in getting jobs in the formal sector in urban areas, such as teachers, civil servants, clerical workers, and bankers. And the people of the remaining families (such as families of traders, workers, and craftsman) showed an in-between pattern. These show that there is a rather distinct separation among these families in ways of coping with sharp economic change. Families of teachers and civil servants were successful inproducing teachers and civil servants in 1970's but the farming families were not. People of farming families only could work in the urban informal sector as carpenters, drivers, mechanics, barbers and so on.The economic depression which started at the end of the 1970's has begun to affect the rural families since about 1980. Families also showed variety in ways of coping with it. Some of the members of teachers' and civil servants' families have become unemployed since 1983, but members of farming families who could not afford to live without any job, endured work in the urban informal sector no matter what the job may be. In both cases, however, many of the young people did not look for the same jobs which senior members of the family had taken.The system which brought about the diversity in ways of adaptation was also analyzed. Each family has a “multi-based” system in which it has several bases in both rural areas and towns (this is called Tako-ashi ((octpus's feet in Japanese)) structure). And it has become clear that the families mobilized the “multi-based” system through home remittancs, remittancs for education, and homecoming, to cope with the exogenouse changes.