The main thrust of this paper is civic education and responsible citizenship in the 21st century Africa:
An Overview. A major dilemma which confronts those who employ citizenship as a performance
criterion need to balance rights against duties and apportion responsibilities between the individual and
the State. Since the early 1980s, this issue has been taken up in the growing debate among the liberal
scholars. The main objectives of this paper are to examine the obligations and responsibilities of African
citizens in this age of democracy and to evaluate the civic virtues of African citizens in the 21st century.
The study was purely qualitative as the methodology of the research was based on secondary sources
only. Simple historical and explanatory methods were used in the analysis of the data. The classical
theory of democracy was adopted as the theoretical framework. The paper thus found out that citizenship
is understood in a narrow sense by some countries in Africa, as a result the study recommends among
others, that member-states of African Union should do well to educate their citizens on the civic virtues
necessary for harmonious and peaceful coexistence in the continent of Africa.
