LEADERSHIP QUESTION AND THE MASSES’ CULPABILITY: A CRITICAL RE-APPRAISAL OF NIYI OSUNDARE’S THE STATE VISIT AND PAUL UGBADE’S OUR SON THE MINISTER
Abstract
This paper interrogates the masses’ culpability in the Nigerian leadership reality in Niyi Osundare’s The State Visit and Paul Ugbede’s Our Son the Minister. The paper notes that Nigerian literary canvass is replete with discourses that primarily attribute the socio-political impasse bedeviling the postcolonial Nigerian nation to leadership inanities and, Nigerian writers from inception have depicted this with benumbing verisimilitude in their various creative enterprises. However, these writers have consistently glossed over and ominously exonerate the ‘followership’ from the ruinous albatross hanging on the nation’s neck. It is against the backdrop of this gap that this paper seeks to bridge. The paper adopts New Historicism as theoretical standpoint, and through a close reading and analysis of some extrapolations from the primary texts, the paper questions the canonised literary paradigm of scapegoating only the leadership class for the wreckage that has swallowed the Nigerian nation. The paper concludes that the followership should also be brought to literary spotlight as monstrous accomplices in the sadism that has engulfed the country.
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