By Amin Kef Sesay
The extreme infrastructural backwardness of potentially very wealthy districts such as Karene, Falaba, Koinadugu, Tonkolili, Moyamba, Bonthe, Pujehun and others only means that the young people have no incentive to stay in their places of birth and help to develop them. Instead, they are daily streaming into the cities and those lucky going abroad in search of greener pastures.
Thus, without rapid, intense focus on rural development, urbanization will adversely affect the short, medium and long term development of the rural areas and the country in general.
Development and growth are not the same in terms of the relationship between urbanization and rural development.
For example in many developing countries we see fast economic growth (new airport-building project, roads, energy, water, housing, high rise buildings, schools, universities, colleges, investment, employment, etc). This is growth without development because such urbanization affects sustainable development negatively.
With Freetown, Bo, Kenema, Kono, and Makeni having the bulk of the urban population, there are fewer people in the rural areas which in the absence of machines has seriously impacted on food production as the majority of youths migrate to the urban areas and are unemployed or underemployed.
Because of lack of industries, Freetown, Bo, Kenema, Makeni cannot support the millions of young people that have moved from rural areas.
The result is that increased unemployment rate , poor housing, lack of access to water and electricity in the urban areas for those that end up in the ghettoes, as well as limited access to good quality educational and medical facilities which make the bigger part of the urban society unable to disentangle from poverty.
Ironically, there are lots of livelihood alternatives to be found in rural areas: such as livelihood in agriculture and cottage industries but these places lack modern amenities which are what the Government, Councils international NGOs should be fighting to provide so that people can have gainful employment, feel comfortable and live with dignity where they are, instead of migrating into the big towns in search of opportunities that are very hard to find.
Several highly visible signs show that urbanization cannot support sustainable development as it creates in the cities social, economic and environmental problems (slums, noise, overcrowding, shortage of water, disease, frustration, crime, prostitution, etc).
By right, it is the rural areas that should provide the urban areas with food. In our own case, because of urbanization, agricultural employment has fallen and the contribution to the gross national product of the agricultural sector has measurably decreased whilst on rice alone, which can be easily grown by rural populations, Sierra Leone loses annually about 400 million dollars importing it when producing rice here for the population will create employment and incomes for at least one million rural dwellers.
Thus, maybe the Government and its international development seriously need to rethink and plan how to divert a big chunk of development funding to the development of potential highly productive rural communities that would automatically make the youths of today run to those places instead of coming to the Western Area to become dropouts, failures, criminals and prostitutes that are serious liabilities to themselves, the Government and society at large.
