By Jennifer Odii
The lifeblood of our continent is draining away, not in a sudden flood, but in a steady, heartbreaking decline. The village clinic, a modest structure built with communal hope years ago, now often stands as a monument to broken promises.
Nurse Adjeley, or Sister Yemisi, or Mr. Wleh – the names change, but the narrative is less so – they might have been the latest in a line of dedicated health workers to finally leave. They say they are tired of treating patients without electricity, without medicine, and without hope. The village children still sit under a tree where a school once stood. Their parents have stopped farming. The rains still come, but no one stays long enough to plant.
Rural Africa
This is the state of too many African nations today, where our villages, the very roots of our societies, are being allowed to wither, forcing a desperate flight to cities already cracking under the strain. And in their desperate flight to the cities, rural migrants are not chasing dreams; they are escaping abandonment. What they find, more often than not, is another kind of collapse. This isn’t a natural emptying; it’s a hollowing out, a direct consequence of decades of policy neglect that is now fueling an urban collapse we can no longer ignore.
Cities Are Growing—But Only in Crisis
It’s a scene repeating itself across African nations – from Nigeria and Ghana, to Liberia, Kenya and Tanzania. Slums swell at the edges of Lagos and Accra. In Monrovia, one in three Liberians lives in a single overcrowded city. Children are born into slums without toilets. Markets overflow into the streets. Rent rises faster than wages. And yet the influx does not stop.
Urban populations are booming, but few cities are truly growing. They are bulging—unstable, overburdened, and structurally unprepared. As noted by AfDB, African cities are expanding faster than any other region of the world. These cities are struggling with limited coverage of urban services, slum housing conditions, general environmental deterioration, confused transport systems, pollution and other discordant tunes thereby resulting in many residents living in poverty and unplanned informal settlements.
In Nigeria alone, housing shortages top 20 million units. In Ghana, about 6 million of 33 million people urgently need housing, and slum populations jumped by over 60 per cent between 2017 and 2020. Roads are gridlocked. Clinics are swamped. In Liberia’s capital Monrovia (already home to one-third of the country’s people), sprawling slums grow alongside planned streets.
Every day, thousands more people arrive at cities. We treat this as migration. But what if it’s a forced eviction from rural areas?
The Real Crisis Isn’t Urban—It’s Rural Neglect
The problem begins far from the city. In places where the harvest no longer feeds the farmer, where children walk hours to reach a blackboard, and where a cough untreated becomes a funeral. Governments have systematically withdrawn from rural areas. The rural exodus is not a choice; it is a forced eviction driven by the systematic collapse of essential pillars:
Farming on Life Support: For too long, we have paid lip service to agriculture while actively undermining it. Poor infrastructure means crops rot before reaching markets. Lack of access to credit, modern farming techniques, and fair pricing leaves farmers perpetually indebted and impoverished. The soil is still rich, the rains (though increasingly erratic) still fall. Yet, patch by patch, the land lies fallow. Young Ibrahim, or Kwame, or Kiprop, or Tamba, has seen his parents toil for decades, their backs bent, their hands calloused, only for meagre harvests to be decimated by insecurity or pests the promised extension officer never arrived to help combat. The expectation of farming as a dignified path to prosperity is a bitter joke. So, he too dreams of leaving for the city.
The Health Vacuum: Access to healthcare, a fundamental human right, becomes a lottery in rural Africa. Clinics, if they exist, are often dilapidated, understaffed, and ill-equipped. Preventable diseases claim lives needlessly. Pregnant mothers face perilous journeys to deliver their babies safely. This isn’t just a matter of individual tragedy; it’s a critical economic drain. A sick population cannot be a productive one. Reports from the World Health Organization paint a stark picture: the doctor-to-patient ratio in rural areas of many African nations is terrifyingly low, sometimes exceeding 1 to 50,000, compared to urban centers.
Schools of Last Resort: Education, the ladder out of poverty, is often rickety and broken in our villages. In the village of Kitui, Kenya, the solar panels donated for the digital classrooms rust silently. “They worked for a week,” laughs Mr. Omondi, the lone teacher, as he writes math problems in the dust. His own diploma hangs in a Nairobi slum, where he shares a shanty with cousins, commuting home only on holidays. Across African villages, teachers are scarce, often untrained and demoralized. Classrooms are overcrowded, lacking basic materials like books and desks. The promise of a brighter future through education rings hollow when the nearest decent secondary school is an unaffordable, day-long journey away. Many will eventually join their relatives to seek fortunes in distant, precarious cities.
This is not just neglect—it’s policy. The consequence is that millions are forced out, not pulled, into cities. They arrive seeking opportunity but find themselves in a desperate scramble for survival, crammed into slums and ghettos, straining already inadequate water, sanitation, and transport systems. Development funds are hoarded in capitals. The logic is simple: invest where the powerful live. People do not leave for cities because they want to; they leave because they must.
Urban Bias Is a Policy, not a Mistake
There is a name for this system: urban bias. It is as old as independence, rooted in colonial capital-centric planning and reinforced by postcolonial elites. Roads lead to power, and power stays where the roads go. In Abuja or Accra, elites argue that urban growth is natural. That migration is inevitable. But this dodges the truth: when you drain resources from the rural majority to feed a few urban centers, you manufacture collapse.
What if a child in Biu or Bong County had the same school, hospital, and roads as a child in the capital? What if governments treated small towns as vitals, not expendables? The exodus would slow. The burden on cities would ease. And both urban and rural life could stabilize.
What We Must Do Now
It’s not enough to tell young people to “stay home” in the village. We must make the home worth staying in. Here’s how:
1. Redirect Investment to Rural Areas: Give state and local governments direct, protected funding for clinics, schools, roads, and markets. Tie national budgets to rural service benchmarks.
2. Rural Industrialization – Beyond the Hoe: Build agro-processing hubs and light factories in farming zones. Let maize become flour in Bida, or cocoa become chocolate in Kumasi. Rural workers deserve more than subsistence.
3. Build Satellite Towns, Not Just Megacities. Develop well-planned market towns and Satellite Towns with reliable utilities and affordable housing. Create real alternatives to urban congestion.
4. Break the Bias. Mandate that every national project includes rural equity indicators. Urban development should not mean rural abandonment.
Villages are not relics. They are roots. If we let them die, the tree of our nations cannot stand.
If you want to save the city, save the village first. Speak up. Demand reform. Rethink the map. Redirect the future. We built cities on the bones of our villages. It’s time to rebuild the villages on the bones of our conscience. Because when villages thrive, cities breathe—and when they die, nations suffocate.
● Odii an entrepreneur, and founder of Real Estate Stakeholders Support Initiative, writes from Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Email: officialodiijennifer@gmail.com
