A Dissertation submitted to the School of Public Administration and Management for the Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the award of a Master’s Degree in Local Government (MSc.LGM), Mzumbe University.
Like in other developing countries, citizen`s participation in democratization processes including elections is highly emphasized by both the government and other stakeholders within a political arena in Tanzania .Despites this background, experiences from around the world show that, turnout of citizen`s participation in Presidential elections tends to be low even in a situation where civic education and campaigns have been made.
This research aimed at exploring the reasons for low turnout of citizen`s participation in 2010 Presidential election at Kigoma Municipal Council, where by four objectives have been developed including; examining citizens participation in Presidential election at KMC, assessing citizens awareness on the importance of Presidential election at KMC, exploring the reasons for low turnout of citizen`s participation in Presidential election and examining ways for motivating citizens participation in presidential election at KMc In order to acquire and capture primary and secondary data in responding the study objectives together with research questions, this research used structured and non structured interviews, questionnaires and documentary reviews as the methods of data collection in which 70 respondents have been sampled from 12 Wards of Kigoma Municipal Council and the Microsoft excel was used for data processing and analysis.
Findings of this study show that, Citizens participation in 2010 Presidential election at KMC was subsequently low in a sense that citizens do not participate effectively in elections, to the large extent because of; lack of adequate political consciousness, PVNR limitations, Citizens perceptions on elections and poor voting system. The research concluded that, recently there is a rapid decline of citizens political will to involve in politics whereby the situation tends to threat the practice of democratic governance. This research recommended that the government and other stakeholders of democratization processes within the country should reform PVNR system, introduce electronic voting and registration, also provision of adequate political knowledge is required