By Onoja Innocent

Owerri—A GOVERNORSHIP aspirant on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party,PDP, in Imo State, Mr. Ken Ojiri, has said that if governance was extended beyond the state capitals, those in the rural areas would  have no reason to migrate to the city.

Ojiri, who   said this in  Owerri when some PDP members paid him a courtesy call, regretted that much attention was being focused on the state capital at the expense of the rural areas.
He said: ‘’As long as the state governors continue to overlook the rural areas in their development plans, there shall always be all manners of challenges in the city because everyone likes good life. “Most of the insurrections the country has experienced till date is traceable to lack of attention at the rural level, whether as Niger Delta militancy or Boko Haram, MASSOB or whatever nomenclature you want to call it.   All would have been arrested if the rural areas were given adequate attention.

“In truth, majority of the violent attacks the country has witnessed from various militant groups wouldn’t have been, if the state governors were alive to their responsibilities to the rural areas.
“These people carry arms as a way of venting their bottled-up spleen. Check them out, many of them are educated, many are artisans who could find something to do, if the amenities and infrastructures found in the cities were extended to the rural areas. They find expression in the barrels of the gun.”