A COMPARISON STUDY OF CHALLENGES FACING EFFECTIVE SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE AND ADMINISTRATION IN BUCOLIC AREAS IN BOTH SOUTH AFRICA AND NIGERIA BY NWACHUKWU PRECIOUS TOBECHUKWU TOBY A thesis submitted in accordance with the requirement for the award of the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Social Work UNIVERSITY OF ZULULAND DECLARATION I, Precious Tobechukwu Toby Nwachukwu declare that this thesis is original and independently written by me. It is a record of my research work and has not been presented to any institution or to any publication. All sources used or cited have been duly acknowledged by way of direct or indirect referencing. Name of Student: P.T.T. NWACHUKWU Student Number: 200905450 Signature: Date: 15th November, 2015 Promoter: Prof.N. H. NTOMBELA Signature: Head of Department of Social Work Date: 15th November, 2015 Promoter: Prof. G. H. KAMWENDO Executive Dean Faculty of Arts Date: 11th May, 2017 i DEDICATION I dedicate this work to all the ethically right-minded practitioners that would want to make a difference within the social services profession and those who believe in me especially my beloved ones Ndalo- Chinazo Tobey Mesuli Nwachukwu and Penelope Noluthando Dlamini. Of prime importance, I also dedicate this work to Almighty God, Jehovah for His Grace to see me through this task and journey. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank the following individuals: the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Prof. G. Kamwendo for his prompt assistance in bringing this work to its completion after some challenges that needed to be addressed, my promoter, Prof N.H. Ntombela for supporting this study; Miss. D. Viljoen, Chief Research Administration Officer, University of Zululand who provided me with the requisite instruments such as a video camera; Prof D. Ocholla, Deputy Dean, Faculty of Arts, for his mentored guidance and counsel; and Mrs. B.S.P. Khumalo, Secretary of the Department for her assistance. In addition I also wish to give thanks to the following persons: . All the employees of the Department of Social Development, Ulundi Cluster, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa who irrespective of workload and schedule took time to complete the questionnaires and permitted me on the job-trailing to get the salient points during the study, especially; Miss Champion and Mrs .Noku of the Department of Social Development, Onogoye in shaping the pilot study of this research. Aunty Cordelia and Mrs G. Dimuoji of the Ministry of Women Affairs & Social Development, Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria and all the employees of the Ministry and Local Government Areas that partook in the research and made this study a successful reality. All the employees of the Ministries of Youths, Sports and Social Development, and also those of Women Affairs and Poverty Reduction, Lagos State, Nigeria for their participation in the research; and also Mr. Ademola of the Department of Community Development and Agriculture, of Lagos State, Nigeria. Mr. E. Jembere of the Department of Computer Science, of the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal and Miss Jessica of the Department of Statistics at the University of Kwa Zulu-Natal for their statistical and codification analysis of this work. Dr. A.C. Onuora- Oguno of University of Pretoria and Dr. Okey Anyaoha of Imo State University, Owerri, Barr. Chigozie Anujulu in Calabar and Sister Jovita Nwachukwu. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to all members of my family for their prayers and support, also everybody that assisted me during the course of this study’s completion and my examiners: 1. Prof. Wilburn Hayden, (PhD), School of Social Work, York University Toronto, Canada 2. Prof. Antoinette Lombard, (PhD), Department of Social Work and Criminology, University of Pretoria, South Africa 3. Prof. Simon Kang’ethe, (PhD), Department of Social Work, University of Fort Hare, South Africa. May God bless all of you. 4. Dr. Odereleng Jankey (PhD). Department of Social Work, University of Botswana, Botswana. iii ABSTRACT An analysis of the social service practitioners’ practice tools in Africa towards the enhancement of professional responsibility to the client system is essential including investigating the ethical dilemmas experienced by the practitioners daily. These tools serve as sources of evaluating social work practice and administration that spur practitioners to provide a virtuous professional service and as enlightenment for the effective, efficient and reflective practice. The National Association of Social Workers (2008) and the South African Council of Social Service Professional (SACSSP, 2005) and their ethical values and principles served as this study principal document that directed this research venture. The researcher sought to understand the nature and extent of the challenges facing social work practitioners and administrators and compared their experiences within two different geo-political zones of Africa. Hence, the research philosophy engaged the “diamond metaphor,”in the sense it is multifaceted and within a blended research paradigm. It depicts the uniqueness and value of each study area. The study employed the comparison-evaluative approach depicting a Multi-Phase-Transformative mixed methods research design characterised by a six way dimensionalapproach of explorative, evaluative, descriptive, comparative, qualitative and quantitative approaches in order to reconnoiter the experiences of social work practitioners 135 and 47 administrators which in total 182 respondents from three different regions namely: KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) and Lagos State and Imo State (Nigeria). Each setting for data collection differs within a multi-level mode and each data including the tested hypotheses were refined to actualise the subject situation and the analytical discussion of the methodology components. Data that was gleaned from the dispersed research tools used for the study were analysed by the utilisation of descriptive statistics, multiple comparisons and post hoc test correlations in testing the stated hypotheses with the Statistical Programme for Social Sciences (SPSS Version 21.0). However, the thematic gleaning of the responses was deciphered through discourse analysis (Soini and Birkeland, 2014:215- 216; Gross, Alba, Glass, Schellenberg and Obrist, 2012:3). The findings of the study revealed that rural social work interventions are directly weakened by a poor support system that the social workers experience, thus, the lack of proper literacy and qualification levels in the rural areas largely contributes to weaker social work interventions in both Nigeria and South Africa. iv Furthermore, the study revealed that administrators avail themselves to more continuous professional development than the social workers do, while the overall qualification attributes for the respondents needed upgrading to cater for specialised areas. The study revealed that the lack of the analysed and aligned training needs of individual practitioners serves in fact to clog personal development plans which the subsequently affects the development of work plans and the signing of performance agreement job descriptions, thus, the policies are not then applied. The study’s results indicated that the administrators’ gendered pattern impacted significantly on the ethical code outcome in the study areas. Outcome analysis confirmed that thesocial workers’ understanding of ethical code application has significantly correlated with their integer years of practice experience, whereas, the perceived difficulties presumably had partial correlations within the study areas. Moreover, the ethics concerning the integrity of profession, the professional responsibility, the service delivery and the competence/confidentiality explained for the integer years of practice experience. Furthermore, the integer years significantly ensure that social workers are coping with ethical dilemmas on familiarity and their professed complaint anxieties on the Ethical Code in the three study areas. Conversely, the study advocated for the assimilation of interactional justice approach that would enhance advocacy on social justice, human rights and professional accountability as well as stimulate competence within the bucolic social worker’s career. Social justice cognizance should be visible within the equity on performance. The study’s recommendations included advocating for quality rural social work interventional support and improvement on qualification and literacy level in the rural areas; also that there should be the recognition of a greater prioritisation of NASW/SACSSP ethical codes. As such, experienced practitioners should mentor newer practitioners to enhance effective and efficient professional responsibility with client-systems. Additional studies should explore the professional responsibility of practitioners amid the Service Charter for Victims of Crime (victims’ charter) designed to uphold social justice and to nurture a human rights philosophy in guaranteeing the material, psychosocial and emotional needs of victims. Hence, further research on utilising the study’s finding models for urban domain and proper professional training, adherence to these models and awareness of legal ethics is recommended. Further studies should focus on examining administrators-practitioners relationship outcome to policies regulations as they are geared towards the Code; likewise to inspect social entrepreneurial activity using the Service Delivery Model to re-bolster industrial social work. v LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Summarised