Historicizing on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Rural Development Project in Nigeria

It is crystal clear that the quest to develop the rural settings has engaged the attention of various political administrations in Nigeria since independence. This assumes the guise of community, local or grassroots development. It is a truism that rural development wields the key to the holistic progress of any civilized and industrialized society in the 21st century. This is against the backdrop of the brazen fact that critical issues such as peace and security, capacity building, poverty alleviation formula, social reengineering, inter-alia revolve around a calibrated implementation of rural development policy(ies). What is worrisome is that Government efforts, through diverse programmes, leave much to be desired as they have been crippled by bureaucratic ineptitude and official corruption that has assumed the status of an albatross. The rural economy has suffered gross neglect even in the midst of natural endowments that have attracted the presence of multinational corporations. From the hindsight of history, most host communities have been marginalized with serious implication for peaceful co-existence, and conflict-laden relations. The main thrust of this paper is that the concept of corporate social responsibility should be adopted as a new approach in result-oriented rural development where the trans-national corporations and virtually all institutions engaged in the exploitation of host communities will be mandatorily involved in their socio-economic development as inalienable dividend of a democratic dispensation in the march towards nation-building. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p6