Rural service centres and settlement stabilisation in Nigeria

Abstract

In spite of the fact that the rate of urbanisation is rapidly increasing, Nigeria is still a country of village settlements, rural in character and agricultural in economy. About 75% of the country’s estimated 90 million inhabitants still live in rural communities made up of relatively big and compact villages and dispersed homesteads. This seems to suggest that any development policy aimed at alleviating poverty by providing basic services and creating income-earning opportunities should concentrate on organising these rural settlements in such a way that they will be able to play a key role in gainfully occupying the population and thereby stabilising the rural settlements. Indeed, as Mosely has argued there is a need to invest in small towns which will ultimately provide growth and service functions within an agrarian structure.’ The paucity of viable rural settlements with opportunities for remunerative work and minimal amenities such as clean water, health care, electricity, and decent shelter is a major push factor which drives hundreds of thousands of young men and women from rural areas into the cities. But the cities swelling at astronomical rates are ill-prepared to cope with this human tidal wave. The few urban centres can absorb only a fraction of the new immigrants at steady wages while the rest have to make out living off their relatives or by finding petty employment in trades, crafts, and crime. Despite continuing outmigration, however, and despite even occasional remittances to their home villages from those lucky enough to have found a job in the city, the stabilisation of the rural population in viable settlements is fundamental to solving both the problems of Nigerian cities and those of the rural settlements. The need to develop a spatial organisation of functional rural settlements which could provide appropriate focal points and transmit growth impulses to the surrounding areas is recognised in the current National Development Plan of 1981-1985.* However, little effort has been made to identify those rural service centres, their functional structure and roles, and plan for their effective functioning as stabilisers of rural settlements. The main objective of this paper is therefore to identify and discuss those functional roles of rural service centres in Nigeria for which they have been associated with providing the rural settlements with some stabilising factors. The economic, social, political and administrative roles of these rural service centres and their relevance to maintaining an agrarian economy in Nigeria will be