CHAPTER ONE
INTRODCUTION
This world of development that is bellowing through most developing countries depends to a large extent on the active participation of the population. Inspite of governments effort to provide the people with basic amenities and ensure their social and economic well being, the indisputable fact remains that no being the ever been able to satisfy all sections of the society nor provide the citizenry with all the social and economic needs. As a result, local development endeavours have become agents for supplementing government effort in these problems.
In other world though government in developing countries do their best to raise the living standard of the people their effort would be useless and fruitless if people who are to be the recipients of the benefits of development do not support such effort
As a development country Nigeria is best with enormous and economic problems ranging from rate of unemployment poverty hunger inflation armed robbery economic slump low productivity to malnutrition starvation illiteracy poor housing poor urban sanitation and general ignorance. It is this bizarre situation that compel local government to mobilize all the human and material resources available to them towards solving these problems.
In the past the tendency was for the government to be looked upon as a benevolent father who was responsible for development of the rural area and the provision of the basic needs of the people. But now there is change of attitude and the local or rural areas have come to accept self-help and less dependence on government as their basic strategy for development. This paper is concerned with the effect of local government administration in economic and social development of the country and this study will be based on socio- economic development projects going on in the Idemili local government areas.
This study is aimed at enabling the researcher to ascertain whether the local government are actually fulfilling their obligation to project in the local government areas in terms of grant-in- aid technical and other aids. Since effective and meaningful social economic development depends on the active participation of the people, the researcher intend to examine their level