JAMB UTME - Use of English - 1980

  Although our aim is to nurture healthy children, Nigerian children are still subjected to severe physical and mental stress as they develop.
So far our interest and activities have been to ensure their physical well-being through the reduction of high mortality and morbidity rates, still inadequate as this may be. But we need to examine from time to time the other needs of the Nigerian child which will ensure a totally healthy development.
We are split between two cultures – our traditional and the Western, a relic of our colonial past. This also affects our child-rearing practices. Therefore, these practices must have a very important bearing on how the child is prepared for our world of today so that he fits into our disturbed cultural milieu.
Different styles of child-rearing and education can produce different personalities in terms of motivation, aggressiveness, achievement and integration of the individual into the community socially and culturally. It is important that, while we struggle with the visible organic disease, we fix our gaze on the other important measures to attain this end – a healthy child.
The process of social adjustment begins from the moment of birth. Many of our traditional birth practices ensure that the mother either carries or suckles her child immediately after birth. The baby therefore comes into close contact with the mother at this critical time.
Moreover she is forced to stay indoors with the baby for varying periods of time. By this means, the attachment of the baby to the mother, so essential for the child’s ability to relate to her in future is secured.
This crucial moment in the baby’s life is now being recognized in the Western countries, whilst birth practices in some hospital and maternity homes separate mother and child immediately after birth to the extent that their ability to develop a close relationship may be jeopardized.
Our Nigerian child of today may, therefore, be worse off than that of yesterday. As we move towards the training of our traditional birth attendants with a view to incorporating them into our health services, healthy practices such as the one described above must be maintained and encouraged

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple

  Over the years there has been this hue and cry by government and the public policy advisers against the phenomenon of the rural-urban drift. Researches have been conducted on various aspects of this phenomenon which have resulted in the identification of the various causes and consequences of drift. In addition, prescriptions have been given for controlling the rural-urban drift.
Among the causes most often mentioned are population pressures in some rural areas resulting in dwindling farm lands; increase in school enrollment and the resultant rise in education levels which qualify many people for urban employment, higher wages in the urban centres relative to rural centres and the rather naïve one of the ‘bright lights’ in the cities so much touted by early foreign sociologists.
The most often mention consequences of this rural-urban migration includes depopulation of the rural area leading to overcrowding of the cities and the resultant housing and sanitation problems; decline in the agricultural population resulting in less food crops being grown and high food prices in the cities, and increasing urban unemployment. The results of the phenomenon are seen largely as negative
Measures to control the rural-urban drift includes the establishment of essential amenities like water, electricity, hospitals, colleges, and cinema houses; the location of employment generating establishment and the building of good interconnecting roads.
The sum total of these prescriptions in essence, unwittingly or paradoxically, is for the rural areas to be transformed into urban centres. This is so because to industrialize the rural areas would draw many more people out of agriculture than if industries were restricted to urban centres
When industries are located in the rural areas, it involves much less cost for the prospective rural-urban migrant to change to a non-agricultural job, than is involved in his leaving a rural abode for a distance urban centre.
Therefore, rural industrialization holds a higher potential for the de-agriculturalization of the rural population than when industries are concentrated in urban areas.
The phenomenon of rural-urban migration has been intensively and extensively researched and studied, but it would seem that it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Consequently public policies on the subject have been misdirected.

  I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple

  Although our aim is to nurture healthy children, Nigerian children are still subjected to severe physical and mental stress as they develop.
So far our interest and activities have been to ensure their physical well-being through the reduction of high mortality and morbidity rates, still inadequate as this may be. But we need to examine from time to time the other needs of the Nigerian child which will ensure a totally healthy development.
We are split between two cultures – our traditional and the Western, a relic of our colonial past. This also affects our child-rearing practices. Therefore, these practices must have a very important bearing on how the child is prepared for our world of today so that he fits into our disturbed cultural milieu.
Different styles of child-rearing and education can produce different personalities in terms of motivation, aggressiveness, achievement and integration of the individual into the community socially and culturally. It is important that, while we struggle with the visible organic disease, we fix our gaze on the other important measures to attain this end – a healthy child.
The process of social adjustment begins from the moment of birth. Many of our traditional birth practices ensure that the mother either carries or suckles her child immediately after birth. The baby therefore comes into close contact with the mother at this critical time.
Moreover she is forced to stay indoors with the baby for varying periods of time. By this means, the attachment of the baby to the mother, so essential for the child’s ability to relate to her in future is secured.
This crucial moment in the baby’s life is now being recognized in the Western countries, whilst birth practices in some hospital and maternity homes separate mother and child immediately after birth to the extent that their ability to develop a close relationship may be jeopardized.
Our Nigerian child of today may, therefore, be worse off than that of yesterday. As we move towards the training of our traditional birth attendants with a view to incorporating them into our health services, healthy practices such as the one described above must be maintained and encouraged

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  Over the years there has been this hue and cry by government and the public policy advisers against the phenomenon of the rural-urban drift. Researches have been conducted on various aspects of this phenomenon which have resulted in the identification of the various causes and consequences of drift. In addition, prescriptions have been given for controlling the rural-urban drift.
Among the causes most often mentioned are population pressures in some rural areas resulting in dwindling farm lands; increase in school enrollment and the resultant rise in education levels which qualify many people for urban employment, higher wages in the urban centres relative to rural centres and the rather naïve one of the ‘bright lights’ in the cities so much touted by early foreign sociologists.
The most often mention consequences of this rural-urban migration includes depopulation of the rural area leading to overcrowding of the cities and the resultant housing and sanitation problems; decline in the agricultural population resulting in less food crops being grown and high food prices in the cities, and increasing urban unemployment. The results of the phenomenon are seen largely as negative
Measures to control the rural-urban drift includes the establishment of essential amenities like water, electricity, hospitals, colleges, and cinema houses; the location of employment generating establishment and the building of good interconnecting roads.
The sum total of these prescriptions in essence, unwittingly or paradoxically, is for the rural areas to be transformed into urban centres. This is so because to industrialize the rural areas would draw many more people out of agriculture than if industries were restricted to urban centres
When industries are located in the rural areas, it involves much less cost for the prospective rural-urban migrant to change to a non-agricultural job, than is involved in his leaving a rural abode for a distance urban centre.
Therefore, rural industrialization holds a higher potential for the de-agriculturalization of the rural population than when industries are concentrated in urban areas.
The phenomenon of rural-urban migration has been intensively and extensively researched and studied, but it would seem that it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Consequently public policies on the subject have been misdirected.

  I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.

  Over the years there has been this hue and cry by government and the public policy advisers against the phenomenon of the rural-urban drift. Researches have been conducted on various aspects of this phenomenon which have resulted in the identification of the various causes and consequences of drift. In addition, prescriptions have been given for controlling the rural-urban drift.
Among the causes most often mentioned are population pressures in some rural areas resulting in dwindling farm lands; increase in school enrollment and the resultant rise in education levels which qualify many people for urban employment, higher wages in the urban centres relative to rural centres and the rather naïve one of the ‘bright lights’ in the cities so much touted by early foreign sociologists.
The most often mention consequences of this rural-urban migration includes depopulation of the rural area leading to overcrowding of the cities and the resultant housing and sanitation problems; decline in the agricultural population resulting in less food crops being grown and high food prices in the cities, and increasing urban unemployment. The results of the phenomenon are seen largely as negative
Measures to control the rural-urban drift includes the establishment of essential amenities like water, electricity, hospitals, colleges, and cinema houses; the location of employment generating establishment and the building of good interconnecting roads.
The sum total of these prescriptions in essence, unwittingly or paradoxically, is for the rural areas to be transformed into urban centres. This is so because to industrialize the rural areas would draw many more people out of agriculture than if industries were restricted to urban centres
When industries are located in the rural areas, it involves much less cost for the prospective rural-urban migrant to change to a non-agricultural job, than is involved in his leaving a rural abode for a distance urban centre.
Therefore, rural industrialization holds a higher potential for the de-agriculturalization of the rural population than when industries are concentrated in urban areas.
The phenomenon of rural-urban migration has been intensively and extensively researched and studied, but it would seem that it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Consequently public policies on the subject have been misdirected.

  I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.

  read each passage and answer the question that follow
The great herald of things to come was Ezekiel, not only in the sense that he predicted the future, but also became in the manner and content of his prophetic ministry, he foreshadowed many of the important religious developments, which were characteristics of the age after the Exile.

He, rather than Ezra, was the founder of Judaism. He not only pointed forward; but as well shall see, he represented some of the great elements in Israel’s religious past.
The book which bears his name is outwardly impressive in its orderliness and symmetry and in the careful chronologic al arrangement of its contents. It purports to present the record of prophecies uttered in the Babylonian Exile between 593 and 571 B.C and for long this was not seriously questioned. Even when other prophetic books have been dissected and assigned to sundry authors and editors, this book continued to be regarded by most scholars as having come into its entirety from Ezekiel. Then came a period in which many extreme theories were advanced , assigning much of it to other hands or presupposing complicated processes of editorial revision, or dating the book to a period much later than the Babylonian Exile, or maintaining that Ezekiel’s ministry was not exercised in Babylonia but in Palestine, or at least was begun there. Such theories have been subjected to damaging criticism and are now somewhat discredited. The account of Ezekiel’s ministry and teaching is based on the view that he lived and worked among the exile in Babylonia, at the period indicated, and the bulk of the material in the book comes from him, though, like other prophetic collections, it owes much in its complication, arrangement and transmission to prophetic disciple

  Although our aim is to nurture healthy children, Nigerian children are still subjected to severe physical and mental stress as they develop.
So far our interest and activities have been to ensure their physical well-being through the reduction of high mortality and morbidity rates, still inadequate as this may be. But we need to examine from time to time the other needs of the Nigerian child which will ensure a totally healthy development.
We are split between two cultures – our traditional and the Western, a relic of our colonial past. This also affects our child-rearing practices. Therefore, these practices must have a very important bearing on how the child is prepared for our world of today so that he fits into our disturbed cultural milieu.
Different styles of child-rearing and education can produce different personalities in terms of motivation, aggressiveness, achievement and integration of the individual into the community socially and culturally. It is important that, while we struggle with the visible organic disease, we fix our gaze on the other important measures to attain this end – a healthy child.
The process of social adjustment begins from the moment of birth. Many of our traditional birth practices ensure that the mother either carries or suckles her child immediately after birth. The baby therefore comes into close contact with the mother at this critical time.
Moreover she is forced to stay indoors with the baby for varying periods of time. By this means, the attachment of the baby to the mother, so essential for the child’s ability to relate to her in future is secured.
This crucial moment in the baby’s life is now being recognized in the Western countries, whilst birth practices in some hospital and maternity homes separate mother and child immediately after birth to the extent that their ability to develop a close relationship may be jeopardized.
Our Nigerian child of today may, therefore, be worse off than that of yesterday. As we move towards the training of our traditional birth attendants with a view to incorporating them into our health services, healthy practices such as the one described above must be maintained and encouraged

  Over the years there has been this hue and cry by government and the public policy advisers against the phenomenon of the rural-urban drift. Researches have been conducted on various aspects of this phenomenon which have resulted in the identification of the various causes and consequences of drift. In addition, prescriptions have been given for controlling the rural-urban drift.
Among the causes most often mentioned are population pressures in some rural areas resulting in dwindling farm lands; increase in school enrollment and the resultant rise in education levels which qualify many people for urban employment, higher wages in the urban centres relative to rural centres and the rather naïve one of the ‘bright lights’ in the cities so much touted by early foreign sociologists.
The most often mention consequences of this rural-urban migration includes depopulation of the rural area leading to overcrowding of the cities and the resultant housing and sanitation problems; decline in the agricultural population resulting in less food crops being grown and high food prices in the cities, and increasing urban unemployment. The results of the phenomenon are seen largely as negative
Measures to control the rural-urban drift includes the establishment of essential amenities like water, electricity, hospitals, colleges, and cinema houses; the location of employment generating establishment and the building of good interconnecting roads.
The sum total of these prescriptions in essence, unwittingly or paradoxically, is for the rural areas to be transformed into urban centres. This is so because to industrialize the rural areas would draw many more people out of agriculture than if industries were restricted to urban centres
When industries are located in the rural areas, it involves much less cost for the prospective rural-urban migrant to change to a non-agricultural job, than is involved in his leaving a rural abode for a distance urban centre.
Therefore, rural industrialization holds a higher potential for the de-agriculturalization of the rural population than when industries are concentrated in urban areas.
The phenomenon of rural-urban migration has been intensively and extensively researched and studied, but it would seem that it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Consequently public policies on the subject have been misdirected.

  Although our aim is to nurture healthy children, Nigerian children are still subjected to severe physical and mental stress as they develop.
So far our interest and activities have been to ensure their physical well-being through the reduction of high mortality and morbidity rates, still inadequate as this may be. But we need to examine from time to time the other needs of the Nigerian child which will ensure a totally healthy development.
We are split between two cultures – our traditional and the Western, a relic of our colonial past. This also affects our child-rearing practices. Therefore, these practices must have a very important bearing on how the child is prepared for our world of today so that he fits into our disturbed cultural milieu.
Different styles of child-rearing and education can produce different personalities in terms of motivation, aggressiveness, achievement and integration of the individual into the community socially and culturally. It is important that, while we struggle with the visible organic disease, we fix our gaze on the other important measures to attain this end – a healthy child.
The process of social adjustment begins from the moment of birth. Many of our traditional birth practices ensure that the mother either carries or suckles her child immediately after birth. The baby therefore comes into close contact with the mother at this critical time.
Moreover she is forced to stay indoors with the baby for varying periods of time. By this means, the attachment of the baby to the mother, so essential for the child’s ability to relate to her in future is secured.
This crucial moment in the baby’s life is now being recognized in the Western countries, whilst birth practices in some hospital and maternity homes separate mother and child immediately after birth to the extent that their ability to develop a close relationship may be jeopardized.
Our Nigerian child of today may, therefore, be worse off than that of yesterday. As we move towards the training of our traditional birth attendants with a view to incorporating them into our health services, healthy practices such as the one described above must be maintained and encouraged

  Over the years there has been this hue and cry by government and the public policy advisers against the phenomenon of the rural-urban drift. Researches have been conducted on various aspects of this phenomenon which have resulted in the identification of the various causes and consequences of drift. In addition, prescriptions have been given for controlling the rural-urban drift.
Among the causes most often mentioned are population pressures in some rural areas resulting in dwindling farm lands; increase in school enrollment and the resultant rise in education levels which qualify many people for urban employment, higher wages in the urban centres relative to rural centres and the rather naïve one of the ‘bright lights’ in the cities so much touted by early foreign sociologists.
The most often mention consequences of this rural-urban migration includes depopulation of the rural area leading to overcrowding of the cities and the resultant housing and sanitation problems; decline in the agricultural population resulting in less food crops being grown and high food prices in the cities, and increasing urban unemployment. The results of the phenomenon are seen largely as negative
Measures to control the rural-urban drift includes the establishment of essential amenities like water, electricity, hospitals, colleges, and cinema houses; the location of employment generating establishment and the building of good interconnecting roads.
The sum total of these prescriptions in essence, unwittingly or paradoxically, is for the rural areas to be transformed into urban centres. This is so because to industrialize the rural areas would draw many more people out of agriculture than if industries were restricted to urban centres
When industries are located in the rural areas, it involves much less cost for the prospective rural-urban migrant to change to a non-agricultural job, than is involved in his leaving a rural abode for a distance urban centre.
Therefore, rural industrialization holds a higher potential for the de-agriculturalization of the rural population than when industries are concentrated in urban areas.
The phenomenon of rural-urban migration has been intensively and extensively researched and studied, but it would seem that it has largely been misinterpreted and misunderstood. Consequently public policies on the subject have been misdirected.

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.

  I began work at the smithy on the Monday morning. My wages were half a crown a week. My hours were from six in the morning till six in the night, with an hour break for launch. My boss, Boeta Dick, was a tall, bent, reedy consumptive. He has a parched yellow skin, brawn tight over his jutting bones. His cheeks were so sunken it was as though he were permanently sucking them in. his eyes were far back in his head. He coughed violently, and beside his seat was a bucket of sand into which he spat. Changing the sand daily was the only part of my job I hated.
The smithy was divided into two parts. At one end were the machines that cut, shaped, and put the tins together. The man who worked on the machines were on a regular weekly wage. At the other end, was a row of small furnaces, each with it own bellows and piles of fuel. Here, at each furnace a man sat soldering the seams of the tins as they came from machines. The solders were on piece work. To average two or three pounds a week they had to do a mountainous amount of soldering. Each solderer had a boy to cart the tins from the machines to him, then to smear the seams of each tin with sulphur powder so that the lead took easily and, after checking, to cart the tins of the yard where the Lorries collected them.

  Although our aim is to nurture healthy children, Nigerian children are still subjected to severe physical and mental stress as they develop.
So far our interest and activities have been to ensure their physical well-being through the reduction of high mortality and morbidity rates, still inadequate as this may be. But we need to examine from time to time the other needs of the Nigerian child which will ensure a totally healthy development.
We are split between two cultures – our traditional and the Western, a relic of our colonial past. This also affects our child-rearing practices. Therefore, these practices must have a very important bearing on how the child is prepared for our world of today so that he fits into our disturbed cultural milieu.
Different styles of child-rearing and education can produce different personalities in terms of motivation, aggressiveness, achievement and integration of the individual into the community socially and culturally. It is important that, while we struggle with the visible organic disease, we fix our gaze on the other important measures to attain this end – a healthy child.
The process of social adjustment begins from the moment of birth. Many of our traditional birth practices ensure that the mother either carries or suckles her child immediately after birth. The baby therefore comes into close contact with the mother at this critical time.
Moreover she is forced to stay indoors with the baby for varying periods of time. By this means, the attachment of the baby to the mother, so essential for the child’s ability to relate to her in future is secured.
This crucial moment in the baby’s life is now being recognized in the Western countries, whilst birth practices in some hospital and maternity homes separate mother and child immediately after birth to the extent that their ability to develop a close relationship may be jeopardized.
Our Nigerian child of today may, therefore, be worse off than that of yesterday. As we move towards the training of our traditional birth attendants with a view to incorporating them into our health services, healthy practices such as the one described above must be maintained and encouraged

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election

  Rufus Okeke – Roof, for short – was a very popular man in his village. Although the villagers did not explain it in so many words, Roof’s popularity was a measure of their gratitude to an energetic young man who unlike most of his fellows nowadays, had not abandoned the village in order to seek work, any work, in the towns. Roof was not villages tout either. Everyone knew how he had spent two years as a bicycle repairer’s apprentice in Port-Harcourt and had given up of his own free will a bright future to return to his people and guide them in these political times. Not that Umuofia needed a lot of guidance. The village already belong en masse to the People’s Alliance Party, and its most illustrious son, Chief the Honorable Marcus Ibe, was Minister of Culture in the outgoing government (which was pretty certain to be the incoming one as well). Nobody doubted that the Honorable Minister would be elected in his constituency. Opposition to him was like the proverbial fly trying to move a dung-hill. It would have been ridiculous enough without coming, as it did now, from a complete nonentity.
As was to be expected, Roof was in the service of the Honourable Minister for the coming elections. He had become a real expert in election campaigning at all levels – villages, local government or national. He could tell the mood and temper of the electorate at any given time. For instance, he had warned the Minister months ago about the radical change that had come into the thinking of Umuofia since the last national election