Urban Migrants and Rural Development

Abstract

Rural development in parts of Nigeria is a function of two comparable, if not, coordinate variables: the government and the townsmen residing in the urban areas. The government provides the access roads, runs schools and health clinics or hospitals built by the townsmen. These urban migrants, as we shall henceforth refer to them for reasons to be explained later, in addition to providing other infrastructural facilities, are the political and economic backbone of the rural communities as well as their source of modernization. Smock (1971) dwelt upon the political and modernity role of ethnic unions in Nigerian cities. She showed how these unions facilitated the accommodation between tradition and modernity in the Eastern political system..., linked commitments with the modern political and administrative structures, and prevented discontinuities, a characteristic feature of transitional political systems. For Smock, urban migrants, successfully manipulated tradition to politically modernize their rural villages. Little (1970) reasoned slightly differently. He saw the major functions of urban associations as the adaptation of traditional institutions and the integration of institutions whose raison d'&tre is alien to traditional culture. These associations nurtured political leaders and the formation of political parties resulting in modernist ambition and nationalist aspirations for self-government. Meillassoux (1968) perceived urban migrants associations, or voluntary associations as he referred to them, as the mechanism by which the migrants approached the problems of social security and created new social networks. Meillassoux also saw a clear nexus between the norms of these associations and their rural origins in terms of their derivation, their roots, and their purposes. It is mainly from this rural-urban link that we shall approach our present discussion. This paper shall also show that the psychological and sociophysical condition in the urban area, the acceptance that the city is a place for austere living and endurance of rough conditions all combine to prepare psychically urban migrants for their role in the economic maintenance and improvemeht of their home rural communities. The Igbo migrants from east of the River Niger are the focal point of this paper since they serve to illustrate the above. Urban sociology literature usually labels such groups of people as rural migrants. This paper, however, terms them urban migrants in order to denote the transciency by which the group perceives itself in the Nigerian situation and to call attention to the fact that while the