Rural development should be taken seriously­­­­

Much of South Sudan is rural and due to the long and protracted civil wars, it was the rural areas, the rural people, and the rural limited infrastructure which had suffered a great deal. For that reason more attention by our national and state ministries of development should be paid on lifting the status of the rural areas and their inhabitants up. Although much is spoken about taking the towns to the villages which lie in the rural areas still little has been done at this juncture. Towns cannot be taken to the towns by simply constructing town like buildings but the steps of taking the towns to the villages must begin with several things. The government policy makers and implementers who are found in the towns should first of all lay down concrete plans of taking towns to the villages. These plans should entail that first roads have to be constructed to join the villages with the towns and where they already exist in rudiments they must be upgraded. When there are road connections then great efforts should be exerted to empower the rural people to be able to utilize the fertile land in their possession for agriculture, and to they are fish in the numerous rivers cutting across the rural areas and be self-sufficient in food supply, then well-equipped medical facilities should be built in the rural areas and rural-based medical personnel should be trained to manage them, clean water should be availed to the rural people, primary and secondary schools should be built for them and staffed with well trained teachers, and all other necessary services should be introduced especially those which are at the moment only available in towns in the rural areas. If all those are done by the time the last service is made available we shall automatically find that the villages have been transformed into towns sort of formations and we can then say we have somehow managed to transfer the towns to the villages or as it is said taken the towns to the people simply because majority of the people live in the rural areas. In the past some communities of South Sudan refer to the towns as bush simply because the life in them was not familiar with the life seen in the villages which was considered as standard in all consideration. To make the towns be better than the villages where most of the people who now call themselves urbanites or townists have originated from they had to use the graduated poll tax collected from the rural people for building infrastructure which were exclusively meant for them at the expenses of the rural people. Now that the urban people have realized that they have taken the lion’s share of the national cake from the rural people who are the majority and have introduced the good policy of taking the towns to the people living in the rural areas, this programme should not be lip service but should be implemented practically. There are dividends that will accrue from taking the towns to the rural areas because what will be produced in the rural areas such as food crops from agricultural endeavours will be shared between the rural population and that of the urban areas. Livestock products like milk will be served by herdsmen of the rural areas to the town dwellers and with introduction of facilities for processing different milk products will be easily made. From this situation it is clear that there are more advantages than disadvantages in taking the towns to the villages.