This paper seeks to reveal Chinua Achebe’s verisimilitude in his colonial-era narratives: Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. These two novels owe their roots to constructs and happenstances that range from myth and semi-myth to real-life events. These occurrences and scenes are congruent to Achebe’s fictional societies partly because of the artistry, believability, and binding force of the warps and wefts of the author’s story-telling craft and partly due to their realistic reality nature. Using the New Historicism critical theory, a re-interrogation of these seminal works will reveal a unique pan-Igbo albeit utopian world, where special characters, scenes, interactions, and revelations play a pivotal role in Achebe’s dream Igbo nation. This, in essence, is his new dream environment, a meta-tale hovering above the two linear plots of the narratives, implicit and ontologically joined but revealed by this paper.

This paper presents a critical comparative inquiry aimed at discussing patterns of Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and Emeka Nwabueze’s A Parliament of Vultures, portrayal, definition, situation as well as contextualization of political corruption and charlatanry in Nigeria. In addition, we are looking at how the texts’ application of the same literary device in projecting similar massages through biting satirical undertones, scathing rebukes and grim humour. Hence, we shall examine the effectiveness of this device in specific instances. To this end, this study seeks to interpret the embedded messages in the texts’ projections of corruption and charlatanry through two characters – Chief Nanga in A Man of the People and Mrs. Omeaku in A Parliament of Vultures. Furthermore, our aim is to explain what the texts view as the immediate and future consequences of the alluded negative vices to the society, espouse on the variables they adduce as the propelling forces, understand better their suppositions on why these vices fester, and adumbrate on suggestions from the texts on how these vices can be eradicated or contained. To carry out this discussion, we are applying theories espousing on reasons behind corruption in politics, and our discussion will be hinged on interpretive approach.

From the 1980s, Nigeria's economy has witnessed severe stagnation. While Eurocentric literature pinpoint the Nigerian civil war and her leaders' corruptive tendency as the prima facie, Afrocentric literatures trace the country's economic woes to her historical processes of colonial domination and economic exploitation. Nevertheless, none of the above arguments underpin more firmly as being the catalyst to the country's economic dysfunction especially when compared to IMF policies in the country. This paper in part, demonstrates that IMF policies in Nigeria vis-a-vis its Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) through its Loan Conditionality is "the crux impediment facing the country." As such, the paper argues that the acceptance of IMF loans during General Ibrahim Babangida's among other misgovernance administration perpetuated the economic woes and fostered the backwardness of the country. Employing primary and secondary sources, the paper posits that a more inclusive economic system devoid of the current extractive economic policies would revitalize its fortunes.

Background/Objectives: Neuro-developmental disorders impose a wide range of learning barriers on learners, increasing stress among their teachers. Evidence attests to the heightened stress among teachers teaching children with such conditions. This study tested the efficacy of blended Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy in reducing job stress among teachers of children with neuro-developmental disorders in Abia State, Nigeria. Method: The current study adopted a group-randomized waitlist control trial design with pretest, post-test, and follow-up assessments. Participants (N = 83) included teachers of children with neuro-developmental disorders in inclusive and specialized schools. The blended Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy group participated in a 2 h intersession face-to-face and online Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) program weekly for 12 weeks. Data were collected using the Single Item Stress Questionnaire, Teachers' Stress Inventory, and Participants' Satisfaction questionnaire. The waitlisted group also received a blended Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy intervention after all data collection. Data collected at baseline; post-test as well as follow-up 1 and 2 evaluations were analyzed using mean, standard deviation, t-test statistics, repeated measures analysis of variance, and charts. Results: Results revealed that the mean perceived stress, stress symptoms, and the total teachers' stress score of the blended Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy group at post-test and follow-up assessments reduced significantly, compared to the waitlisted group. Participants also reported a high level of satisfaction with the therapy and procedures. Conclusion: From the findings of this study, we conclude that blended Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy is efficacious in occupational stress management among teachers of children with neuro-developmental disorders.

The understanding of how gender roles are assigned to abstract issues like witchcraft beliefs, remains a challenge to contemporary African historians. Witchcraft as a significant area of humanistic study, has not sufficiently engaged historians and literary critics. Scholars in Religious and Cultural Studies in Nigeria have made efforts to interpret witchcraft as an aspect of the tradition of various Nigerian groups. In this paper, witchcraft is examined as a phenomenon and a historical assumption based on gender disparity. Combining primary sources from the National Archives of Nigeria and secondary sources in books and journals, this research dissects witchcraft stigmatizations in the light of historical truism. African historiography and literary scholars could benefit from researches on witchcraft by placing it properly in historical chronology and perspectives but most importantly by situating witchcraft phenomenon properly as a frontline and burning topic in understanding the gender politics of the African past and present.

, Florence O. Orabueze2 & Violence in Nigeria has reached its peak such that policies that should engage the youths positively are inevitable. This paper aims to establish that Nigerian youths should not be held accountable for #EndSARS protest. Using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Transitivity model, the paper examined the transitivity processes of the major participants in the discourse, and the circumstances implicated. Explication of images appropriated as discursive strategies were accounted for through insights from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Compositional Metafunction in Reading Image Theory. The analysis was done using a descriptive qualitative research design that supports the description of processes attributed to participants, and how social predictors that assign agentive roles to some participants as Actor, or Sayer; and stripe others of their agencies suggest that in the Nigeria’s social context, the #EndSARS protest was inevitable. Such approach was critical in exposing the undercurrents that informed the protest, which previous researches had paid insignificant attention to. From the analysis, several discoveries were recorded, namely: Nigerian government is majorly, a Sayer interested mainly in protecting its pride; the police, and the military are the Actors, while the youths are the Goal in material processes, and behaver in behavioural processes. The paper concludes that the volatility of the youths was a reaction to the processes of the government, and its agencies. The paper, therefore, recommends that government should show practical interest in the plight of the masses by initiating policies that target to engage them constructively so as to prevent future re-occurrence.

Myth is notably a complex cultural reality that can be approached and interpreted from various viewpoints. Myths generally tell stories about deities or heroic beings. They can be classified into three types: creation myths, eschatological myths, which describe catastrophic ends of the world and myths of gods and goddesses. What we find in the poetry of Okigbo is a combination of all these myths. Myths are the products of a racial or tribal group rather than the creation of an individual. Every culture has its own mythology, according to its cosmology. One hardly comes across a direct statement in his poetry, for he prefers his lines loaded with imagery, allusions, and symbols. This paper aims at delineating the mythic and ritual sequences in the poetry of Christopher Okigbo. Myths are the products of a racial or tribal group rather than the creation of an individual. Every culture has its own mythology, according to its cosmology. Okigbo does not allow for simplicity in the language of his poetry. Okigbo uses the sublime, the esoteric, and the mythic to place his poetry on a universal level.This critical inquirys adopts for its theoretical framework, the mythic/archetypal theory.

Poor leadership has unarguably been recognized as a major national question around which many socioeconomic and political problems revolve in Nigeria. It has led to decadence and a squandermania mentality which breeds all sort of vices, mass poverty, absent and decaying infrastructure, kidnapping, agitations, banditry, and all kinds of insurgency. Playwrights, like other social scientists, have continued to interrogate this ugly phenomenon, which make socioeconomic and political development a will-o'-the-wisp in the country. This paper attempts to examine Emeka Nwabueze's A Parliament of Vultures and Uche-Chinemere Nwaozuzu's The Candles, especially as they deploy the vulture and the candle, respectively, as metaphors to elucidate the question of leadership failure in the unstable and politically explosive minefield that is Nigeria. The study adopts Clifford Geertz's thick description approach to interpretation as its methodology. The researchers discovered that self-aggrandizement, incompetence, "fire-brigade approach," poor institutions, lack of meritocracy, blackmail, and violence were the social realities that encumber the flowering of good governance in the country.

With the global #Metoo movement yet to arrive in Nigeria, Jude Dibia’s Unbridled reflects an emblematic moment for the underrepresented to occupy their stories and make their voices heard. The study analyzes patriarchy’s complicated relationship with the Nigerian girl child, significantly reviewing the inherent prejudices in patriarchy’s power hierarchies and how radical narratives explore taboo topics like incest and sexual violence. Contextualizing the concepts of hypersexualization and implicit bias to put in perspective how women, expected to be the gatekeepers of sex, are forced to navigate competing allegiances while remaining submissive and voiceless, the article probes the struggles of sexual victims and how hierarchies in a patriarchal society exacerbate their affliction through a culture of silence. Arguing that Dibia’s Unbridled confronts the narrative of silence in Nigerian fiction, the article explores ways the author empowers gender by challenging social values and traditional gender roles, underscoring gender dynamics and the problematic nature of prevalent bias against the feminine gender in Nigeria.

This paper attempts to trace the influences, interactions, conflations and developmental trajectories that link the ancient art of oral chants, poetry, minstrelsy, and the contemporary and modernist spoken word versifications in practice today in Nigeria. Audience, form, content, and intent have been pivotal factors in the different epochs that separate the ancient precursors and the present forms in this performance matrix. Through ethnographic and qualitative approaches, and textual analyses, select spoken word poets in contemporaneity have been studied and their verses analyzed for such influences from established traditional forms; validating credence that the ancient forms have built a formidable bulwark of elements and standards that give rise to spoken word poetry fitting for the malaise of the post colony. There has been a dearth of such research scope. Two contemporary spoken word poets with Yoruba (oriki and ijala elements) and Igbo (abu and mbem factors) nationalities are studied in this paper and a nexus has been established that oral tradition has through adequate metamorphoses, augmented a postcolonial tenor and relevance. This study has elicited the use of the spoken word poet as its theoretical anchor.

So many years after independence, more importation of foreign brand of alcohol has remained a strategy of economic imperialism. Attempts to modernize African brands of alcohol such as bottled palm wine and buru- kutu have not received the kind of scientific endorsement it deserve. In all drinking spaces in Nigeria, the foreign brand of drinks in Nigeria domi- nates the market. These brands no doubt serve as a yardstick of measuring class distinction. This trend began as part of deliberate effort to dominate the local economy by re-inventing sense of class, modernity and sense of new belonging expressed through the kind bottles of drinks consumed by the people. As a result, the African brands of drinks were downgraded in a kind of economic war that she plays a subservient role even though by drinking, Africans contributes greatly to the Europeans economy at their own peril.

In the search for meaning, literature has been approached from several varying viewpoints over time. One of these approaches involves viewing it as a member of a specific class which can be engaged in a comparative study. This is based on the Aristotelian notion of mimesis as production, representation and creation of the probable as artists do not just create what they see but what could happen, accounting for the nature of art as a heterocosm. Thus, the approach this paper seeks to take is the phenomenological one which in a comparative manner, searches for core values which are embedded in all literary texts. It will do this by way of searching out the poetic symbol of the hero that cuts across genre form in The Tempest by William Shakespeare and The Slave by Elechi Amadi. This image will also be considered in its contextual form as "slave" taking into account the social and historical contexts presented in the texts.

Abstract Monkeypox is a zoonotic viral disease. Media campaigns are planned to create awareness about the disease. This is because mass media is often the leading source of information and mobilization during important health issues or crisis. The main objective of this study was to assess the media coverage of monkeypox outbreak in Nigeria. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey of residents in Southern Nigeria. A total of 600 respondents were sampled for this study through a multi-stage cluster random sampling technique. Research assistants helped in collecting data from respondents through structured questionnaire. The data collected was analyzed using percentages, mean score, and univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA). Respondents had little or no knowledge of monkeypox virus, its nature, mode of transmission, and prevention mechanism (2.30 ± .918, P = .000). Respondents stated that they learnt about the virus through friends and social institutions instead of media (4.44 ± .945, P = .006). Media failed to create effective and comprehensive awareness campaigns to mobilize the public (1.86 ± 1.196, P = .001), while inappropriate and insufficient media programs and lack of funds were blamed for media ineffectiveness (4.18 ± 1.352, P = .004). The outbreak of monkeypox virus is a public health concern in Nigeria. Media campaigns are planned to raise awareness about the disease; however, these campaigns have not demonstrated effectiveness in changing people's health behavior toward monkeypox. Media, health professionals, and government should synergize to promote a consistent health policy for the control and prevention of monkeypox virus.

This paper examines the politics and didactic nuances of authorial projection of rational choice behavior in Emeka Nwabueze's(1) Rainstorm in the Desert in relation to social burden of concealment. Thus, this paper analyzes the playwright's portrayal of the multiple effects of devious concealment to individuals and the society. To this end, this paper attempts to discuss how aspects and forms of concealment have become subsisting tradition in families, communities, professional conducts, and state governance. Thus, this paper applies the ideas espoused in 'Rational Choice Theory' as a deliberate means of creating a thematic foci aimed at deepening discussion that will enhance the understanding of the propelling forces and variables that compel individual's to make their preferred choice of actions. Also we shall apply the theory of Interpretive Community as a means of discussing the rationale of locale specific perspectives on rational choices and irrational choices. As regards to the analysis of the portrayals, authorial inclinations of the playwright and our application of the selected theories, we adopt interpretive discuss approach. In the end, this study observes that behaviors are describable and measurable as rational or irrational in line with a given Interpretive Community's inclinations even though rational choices are ultimately influenced by factors and variables such as awareness, knowledge, intent, ideology, philosophy and state of mind.