DEALING WITH OUR APATHY THROUGH THE RADIO: ANALYSIS OF THE ROLE OF FRCN NNoKO UMUNWANYI PROGRAMME IN INFLUENCING WOMEN TO PARTICIPATE IN POLITICS

Abstract

The last three decades has been dotted by the continuous agitation by women for equal political positions in the political space of Nigeria. While women advocacy groups and international organisations accuse the men folk of engineering a political architecture that makes it difficult for women to participate, the men believe that there is growing apathy on the part of women. This has brought to the fore the issue of 35 percent affirmative action for women in developing societies like Nigeria. But this can only be achieved by raising the awareness level and interest of women in politics. In line with this demand, the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria (FRCN) Enugu developed a gender political programme- Nn?ko Umunwanyi. The programme which is only targeted at women of Igbo speaking origin in Enugu State, is design to raise the interest of rural women in politics. More than ten years after this programme was designed and broadcast to rural women in Enugu State, how far has it gone in raising the awareness, knowledge level and interest of women in politics? In investigating all these, the researcher used Explanatory Sequential mixed methods design developed by Cresswell (2012) to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. Questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data while focus group discussion was used to generate qualitative data. After a thorough analysis using both quantitative and qualitative data, findings showed that women in Enugu State are exposed to Nn?ko Umunwanyi. programme to a large extent. It was equally found that the knowledge and women participation in politics have increased as a result of their exposure in the programme. Based on these, it was recommended that more programmes of this nature should be designed.

Keyword: World? FRCN? Politics ?Marginalization ?Awareness ?Knowledge ?Participation