Poverty And Rural-Urban Habitats In Nigeria

Abstract

Given the tremendous explosions of urban settlements and the crises of
rural areas during the past two or three decades, the myth, reality and hope of
a sustainable human settlement pattern seem to have been unraveled by the
two UN Habitat Conferences of 1976 and 1996. Even though the unresolved
human settlement issues have for long been grappled with by public policies
in Nigeria, solutions to problems have continued to remain a mystery; with
condition of living being ravaged by poverty. This paper attempts to examine and
analyze general problems of development of urban and rural settlements as well
as various shifts in policies and strategies by the Nigerian oil-based political
economy with the ascendency of endemic poverty. The method of analysis employed
in this study is based on data entirely obtained from secondary sources especially
government policy documents, published books and periodicals relevant to
the subject. The major results of the findings indicate that the tragedy of
the situation is structurally the inadequacy of the policy thrusts. Hence,
the direction of the economic development dictated by western institutions based
on neo-liberal economic options do not favour the poor. The study further
contributes by asserting the irreversible need to put people, not markets, first at
the centre of development where the designs and implementation must be done in
collaboration with the target beneficiaries as all the previous and current
programmes were designed to fail.