The State And Rural Zaria From Affluence To Poverty: Historical Bank

Abstract

Given the abundant human and natural resources located at rural areas, it is expected that rural dwellers will be awashed with continuous affluence. On the contrary, rural areas are deprived of the benefits of resources located within the area. Rural areas have continued to be subjected to all forms of deprivation and thus live in abject and excruciating poverty at the expense of the urban areas. This work attempted to examine the increasing or widening gulf of inequality and trace, over time, how the state has continued to roll out policies and strategies that have deprived rural areas of the basic needs of life at the expense of urban growth and consolidation. Thus, within the
framework of the emergence and consolidation of the State of Zazzau, rural Zaria and its economy became subsumed into the survival operations of the city. This was facilitated through intense extraction of surplus and other forms of appropriations along with economic and political subordination leading to the further urban-rural gap. Lack of access to politically participate in and exert influence on decision making, quality education, health care services and other forms of deprivations that subjected rural communities of Zaria to intense poverty provoke them, more than anything else, to politically unite against their city counterparts and overlords. The point of departure
of the study suggests that for prosperity to override on poverty, rural folks must be strategically strengthened, organized and turned out be politically proactive with enhanced services