The rate at which nations urbanise will influence the performance of the world economy and national economies in the coming years. Already, the growth in the number of people living in cities or urban centres has begun to attract the attention of policymakers because of its potential consequences, if not planned for and managed carefully.
The management of that growth will make a difference between nations that succeed in reducing poverty, even among urban dwellers, and those which fail. It will differentiate between nations that raise the standard of living among their rural dwellers and hence stem the tide of rural-urban drift, and others unable to do so.
The UN-HABITAT has projected that by the year 2030 (roughly nine years to come), the global urban population will reach five billion people. By that time also the world body believes that most of the population of the developing world would live in cities.
This is a continuation of the steep rise in urban population that has gone on since the turn of the last century, rising from 220 million people to about 2.8 billion.
For Nigeria to avoid the danger of rapid urbanisation, there is a need for the authorities to take immediate steps to reverse a practice that is summed in the term “urban bias”. Without this, the acceleration of uncoordinated urbanisation will continue unabated with its undesirable consequences, including the neglect of the rural areas
Urban bias as a theory posits that the retarded growth of the rural areas of the developing world is caused by the actions of powerful interest groups in urban areas who are able to corner most of the resources to be used in their cosy cities.
This is reflected in the deep disparities between the number of financial resources allocated to cities versus the miserly amounts often given to the rural areas, which often seems to be an afterthought. It shows in the level of infrastructure in the cities (even at their low level, globally speaking), and the decrepit landscape that villagers wade through for every single step they take in a day.
Consequently, very little is left over for deployment in the rural areas. Yet, in the actual sense, these neglected areas are the support base of the urban dwellers. The rural areas are the sources of food and other agricultural produce, including raw materials for the manufacturing sector, which keeps the economy growing.
These disparities in turn give rise to the “push-pull” factors that combine to attract rural dwellers with an irresistible power to the cities that are seen as places of an easy life and splendour.
That is because rural areas in the developing world, including Nigeria, have largely been forgotten or neglected, perhaps until recently. What is considered a necessity for urban dwellers is often seen as too good for those in the countryside, hence the absence of infrastructure that would make life easier for them and raise dwellers’ earning power. They lack basic infrastructure such as roads, potable water, health facilities, among others.
Therefore, life there is marked by low incomes because most of them engage in low-productivity, low-yield agriculture and other small-scale cottage industries. Usually, the reward or output from such activities is poor, with low rates of return to their effort, time and other resources.
These are the push factors in our villages. A young man who has engaged in agriculture for a couple of years but has not made significant progress comes to the inevitable conclusion that there is no hope or future for him there. Even those who were there just to provide labour in the villages also leave for the cities, which has led to high labour costs in the rural areas.
Consequently, a common feature of rural life is that the people there are constantly attracted to the urban areas, where life is seen to be better, with many seeking the slightest opportunity to move. Unfortunately, many of those who migrate from the rural areas are often poorly educated and possess very few technical skills that can easily fetch them immediate jobs in the cities.
The cities usually are the centres of industrial and commercial activities. Here, the dwellers generally receive higher earnings than their counterparts still resident in the rural areas.
Historically, cities have played and continue to play quite important roles in the economic development of nations. The UN-HABITAT, in pointing out the role of cities in the economic advancement of nations, has drawn people’s attention to the fact that many of the biggest cities in the world are found in the largest economies.
One of the countries that have exhibited this is China. Moving from a relatively low level of 20 per cent urbanisation in 1980, China raised its urbanisaiton rate to 50 per cent by 2011. That is, by that time, half of its population was living in urban areas. Little wonder that today, about six Chinese cities are among the largest 23 cities of the world: Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen.
This fast rate of urbanization is said to have contributed to stimulate China’s industrialisation and transformation of the living standards of its citizens. It has also reflected in the strength of job creation in cities.
There is no doubt that urbanisation continues to play such roles in countries’ economic development. Yet, the truth is that in some cases, the growth of urban centres in the developing world, marked by low incomes, remains a double-edged sword. It worsens already severe housing challenges, accentuates infrastructure and service provisions deficiency while contributing to other forms of urban congestion and decay. It puts the insufficient infrastructure under further pressure, thus hastening the high level of inner-city decay which is evident in our towns and cities today.
In this situation, the government is faced with two broad choices. It could choose to vote for more funds and resources to improve the facilities in the cities to accommodate more migrants residents. This could come in the form of more budgetary allocations to metropolitan authorities to embark on urban renewal programmes of different magnitudes. Some of these projects are actually executed with donors’ funds.
To the extent that this is done without recourse to the needs of the rural areas, to that extent would the authorities be elongating the vicious cycle. Governments must turn attention to the physical needs of the rural areas. If governments do not extend the city to the villages, the villages will flow into the cities, and everyone would be worse off for it.
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