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THE EFFECT OF CITIZEN’S ENLIGHTENMENT ON COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION IN DEVELOPMENT IN ANAMBRA STATE, NIGERIA (2014-2019)
Abstract
The attainment of development that is all encompassing and beneficial to the citizens in a democratic setting is a mutual responsibility that involves active participation of the citizens and government in development issues. However, since the enthronement of democracy in 1999 in Nigeria, citizen’s participation in transformational planning, implementations and monitoring of projects is still an illusion. This has continued to encourage top-down policies that are not only sparsely implemented, but also not satisfying the needs of the citizens. The glaring apathy of citizens’ involvement in development issues in their local government and communities has been traced to lack of capacity, skill, and pre-requisite knowledge for involvement. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of citizen’s enlightenment on community participation in development in selected local government in Anambra State. The study adopted the cross-sectional survey research design. The population of the study comprised of1779 members of registered community associations who live within the different communities in the selected local government areas of Anambra States. These local governments are the areas where development agencies carried out citizen enlightenment programme. The study adopted a simple random sampling technique to determine the sample size of 249 for this study. The simple random technique was used to select one development association with longest period of existence from each community in the three local government areas in Anambra State which were purposively chosen because of the development agencies’ activities in these areas. Validated questionnaire relating to citizen enlightenment and community participation was the instrument that was used for the collection of data. Descriptive statistics (frequency and percentage) was employed for demographic data analysis, while regression analysis was used to analyse the inferential statistics. The results (β= 0.301, t = 4.533, p<0.05) showed that citizen enlightenment had a positive and significant effect on community participation in development in Anambra State. Consequently, citizen enlightenment should be encouraged in order to drive the participation of citizens in the development of their communities.
Keywords: Citizen’s enlightenment, Community, Participation, Development, Anambra
State.