Introduction
1.1 Background to the Study
Local government has and will continue to be one the prime factor of development in different parts of the world and their importance and impact on daily activities of citizens cannot be over emphasized.
The term local government refers to a political authority set up by a nation or state as subordinate authority for the purpose of dispensing or decentralizing political power. In the English sense, it means local self government.
Local government is a political sub-division of a national government, or in federal system, a sub-division of regional government in fact, local government administration is so intentioned with rural development that any discussion on one out of necessity involved the others. This is because to bring development to the rural at the grass root.
Rural development is not a new ideology. It is defined as a process by which the efforts of the people themselves are linked with those of governmental authorities to improved the economic social and cultural conditions of rural, to integrate them into life of the action, and to enable them to contribute fully to the national progress. Also the role of local government in the promotion of development at the 1976 local government reforms which emphasized that none of the principle objectives of local government is to mobilize human and materials resources through the involvement of members of the public in the promotion of local government.
Many rural has build school, constructed roads and bridges, and organized higher education scholarship schemes for their children etc rural development as we recognized today is based on and has grown out of experience of the past. The concept of rural development is based on the faith. In the ability of people to learn how to help themselves attain an improved standard of living building better rural taking one step at a time.
Rural development has thus remained up the priority item of the programmes of the administration. In drawing up the blue print for rural development government at Enugu State aims primary at sensitizing and mobilizing the people at the grass roots level and deliberately and actively involving them in effective rural development, encouraging integrated and multi dimension approach to rural development for the government to achieve the grass roots development, it must get closer to the people.
Rural development groups and local government should work very closely, government should work very closely, because for instance, a service project such as maternity dispensary or school which is built without the full support of the relevant local government, has very lean changes of survival, since the running and main tenancy expenses of such service are usually too heavy to be borne invalided such rural.
…
