Niger Delta Indigenes’ Perception of Community Participation in The Development Communication Strategies and Practices of Oil Companies in Nigeria (Published)
This study adopts the principles that underpin participatory development communication in order to highlight the ideology that guides oil corporations’ development communication practices and strategies in Nigeria. The study specifically examines the usage of Global Memorandums of Understanding (GMoUs) by oil firms to engage people in community-based development initiatives. Given Shell and Chevron’s stranglehold in onshore, shallow, and deep-water exploration and development in Nigeria, 16 oil-producing localities in their operational zones were chosen at random for the study. The study’s design was cross-sectional and drew from survey procedures. 400 respondents were selected through a multistage selection approach from the study’s population for the purposes of data collection and analysis. The study found that although indigenes of the Niger Delta are aware of the GMoUs programmes, they lack the knowledge to take part in them. Thus, the Niger Delta indigenous people claim that the GMoUs programmes are self-serving and need to be carefully adapted to satisfy the desire of the people for bottom-up induced development. The study suggests that development communication experts be involved in the conception and implementation of the ideas because the GMoU model, which oil companies adopted, was flawed in its conception due to a potential lack of sufficient literature review for development agents to gain the understanding needed to guide implementation.
Keywords: Community Participation, Development Communication, Niger-Delta, global memorandums of understanding
Niger Delta Indigenes’ Perception of Community Participation in The Development Communication Strategies and Practices of Oil Companies in Nigeria (Published)
This study adopts the principles that underpin participatory development communication in order to highlight the ideology that guides oil corporations’ development communication practices and strategies in Nigeria. The study specifically examines the usage of Global Memorandums of Understanding (GMoUs) by oil firms to engage people in community-based development initiatives. Given Shell and Chevron’s stranglehold in onshore, shallow, and deep-water exploration and development in Nigeria, 16 oil-producing localities in their operational zones were chosen at random for the study. The study’s design was cross-sectional and drew from survey procedures. 400 respondents were selected through a multistage selection approach from the study’s population for the purposes of data collection and analysis. The study found that although indigenes of the Niger Delta are aware of the GMoUs programmes, they lack the knowledge to take part in them. Thus, the Niger Delta indigenous people claim that the GMoUs programmes are self-serving and need to be carefully adapted to satisfy the desire of the people for bottom-up induced development. The study suggests that development communication experts be involved in the conception and implementation of the ideas because the GMoU model, which oil companies adopted, was flawed in its conception due to a potential lack of sufficient literature review for development agents to gain the understanding needed to guide implementation.
Keywords: Community Participation, Development Communication, Niger-Delta, global memorandums of understanding
Perspectives on Community Media and Rural Development in Nigeria (Published)
This paper takes a look on perspectives on community media and rural development in Nigeria. It espouses the view that community media are well appreciated by the people because they are well ‘bonded’ with them. Anchored on the agenda setting and agenda building theories, the paper articulates the view that community media are well suited to the needs and aspirations of the communities they serve, thereby promoting development in various aspects. In achieving their objectives, community media are constrained by financial inadequacy, political interference, illiteracy and low patronage, among others. In order to ameliorate some of the difficulties, it is recommended that prospective investors come together and invest in community media; community media should and endeavour to effectively cover their areas while ensuring that they are run professionally. Government, it was also suggested, should intervene in the economic affairs of the rural dwellers so as to empower them for greater participation in the affairs of their environment.
Keywords: Community Media, Development, Development Communication
Application of Development Communication in Africa’s Rural Development: Need for a Paradigm Shift (Published)
Development communication was introduced as an integral part of rural development in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s to promote and facilitate the participation of the rural poor in the sharing of the benefits of development as well as the responsibility for development decision making. The development communication system models derived essentially from dominant economic development theories of the west which emphasised information and persuasion, increases in production and consumption, technological innovation, high level of capital investment and the trickle down of benefits. The extensionist dependent, pro-urban, pro-liferate, pro-mass media, one way flow of influence oriented messages from development workers at the top to the rural peasantry at the bottom (otherwise known as top-down) encouraged source oriented, authoritarian, manipulative and persuasive communication that created dependent rather than collaborative relationships between the source and the receivers of development messages. This paper reviews the impact of development communication in Africa rural development and observes that most programmes did not achieve the desired goals. The paper therefore, calls for a bottom-up, horizontal and participatory communication approaches that actively involve the rural people in the conceptualisation of the problems, setting of objectives and designing of strategies and messages that are capable of reaching all and producing uniform comprehension and acceptance of development messages
Keywords: Dependency Relationships, Development Communication, Rural Communication in Africa.