Participatory Budgeting in Nigerian Local Government Administration: A Panacea for Rural Development in Nigeria

Abstract

The Government annual budget is a public proclamation of its projected and actual expenditures, which provide vibrant suggestion of where a State sets its primacies. Therefore, this article seeks to show how participatory budgeting offers citizens an ample opportunity to study about government procedures and deliberate, discuss, debate, and stimulate allocation of public funds in the local government councils. Through a descriptive historical analysis, this study shows that the local government's current budget reveals that citizens have no knowledge of how local government council is committing itself to in its policy declarations and what it does in its budgetary allocations. The extremely 13 complicated, technical and 14 esoteric nature of the budget-making process and documents does not allow citizens to participate, have any say in it or 16 monitor the process 11, it 18 is the position of this paper that participatory budgeting programs are implemented at the behest of governments, citizens, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and civil society organizations (CSOs) to allow citizens to play a direct role in deciding how and where resources should be spent 20.