Citizen participation in urban governance: experiences from traditional city of Bida, Nigeria

Abstract

Citizen participation in urban governance guarantees effective way of making government more accountable and responsive, minimizing cost, and changing the system of deprivation to broad-based social inclusion. In Nigeria, citizen participation is significantly losing its priorities, despite drastic political and economic reform in the planning legislation from the colonial period to post independent era, especially in traditional cities. For traditional city which requires a relatively high number of redevelopment projects, citizen participation as a component of decision making process, is more complex and difficult due to ineffective level of participation. This could be as a result of challenges of citizen empowerment in participatory process. Most studies on citizen participation still failed to examine empowerment level of citizens in the practices of urban governance in traditional cities. This study, therefore aims at assessing citizen participation in urban governance by examining empowerment level of citizens in traditional city of Bida, Nigeria. Questionnaires were administered using random sampling method to select participants The findings reveal that, tokenism dominates level of empowerment which is insignificant to guarantee effective citizen participation in urban governance. This study suggests areas to improve citizen empowerment and invariably could be used by the practitioners and law makers of public participation to facilitate citizens’ involvement in urban governance in the traditional cities of African countries, like Bida-Nigeria.