If a line of latitude is drawn to equally divide Nigeria into two equal halves, one would notice that the peoples of the southern half take extreme pride in their homestead of origins, especially their villages. They “go out” in their youth to seek work but return back home upon retirement or as old age beckons to live in their villages and their district headquarters; those of means even build retirement “country homes” where the family gathers at Christmas or some other important moments.
The fine point to note here is that, no matter how harsh the environment of their homesteads or no matter the security threats that marauding herdsmen present, these southern folks still retire to the land of their ancestors; their returning home translates to capital in-flows that they are able to influence directly and to capital remittances that their children, grandchildren, and in-laws inside and outside Nigeria make every so often. This is where the North differs significantly from the South; northerners have all but turned their backs on their villages and districts and they are now veritable city-dwellers in perpetuity.
Where a “big-man” or an “Alhaji” should have been the nucleus of his community in the rural area, these communities are left devoid of an influential presence in retirement, and feeling ever so dejected and seeing no purpose to the beauty of rural living, the masses then embark on massive rural-city migrations thus terribly congesting urban spaces. When northern cities are becoming too choked-up, they embark South crammed into trucks like expendable haulage.
The elite from the North do not make it any easy each time they lazily pronounce that “every Nigerian has the right to live anywhere;” they could not have been more incorrect because every piece of Nigerian soil is a good wealth-holding resource and encouraging people to think migration where there exist no real sense of national and tribal integration is creating frustrations and potential future ethnic tensions.
Sunday Adole Jonah,
Department of Physics,
Federal University of Technology, Minna
