We learn from history that some consequences of abysmal government policies and dysfunctional tactics include socio-economic retrogression, increased deprivation ideology, victimhood, rebellion, war and revolution; and theorists have provided several plausible contextualizations for elucidation. One of such conceptualizations is Ted Robert Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation, which can be applied to illuminate sufficiently how discontent enacted in Ahmed Yerima’s trilogy can lead to aggressive responses. Thus, through an interpretive approach, we shall look at how Yerima portrays creatively in his trilogy – Hard Ground, Little Drops, and Ipomu why a show of force, divide and rule, carrot and stick tactics by successive Nigerian governments have exacerbated grief, restiveness and rebellion in Niger Delta because of unwholesome oil exploitation and ineffectual corporate social responsibility approaches. In the end, this study proposes that Niger Delta oil exploitation related discontent will fester and linger if functional inclusiveness and proportional infrastructural development are not deployed progressively.

Certain critics of contemporary Nigerian drama represented by Abiola Irele, for example, seem to place the plays of Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel laureate on literature, squarely within the confines of ritual aesthetics, in terms of dramatic taxonomy. Although ritual, especially Ogunism, exerts a huge influence and, no doubt, constitutes a major master code for interpreting a play like The Bacchae of Euripides, this paper argues that the religious elements in this transnational play merely serve as a camouflage for the exploration of class struggle. Class consciousness, though expressed through religious symbolism, is given much force and weight in the play from its beginning to the end that it seems to be the principal theme of this play. In the text, the masses knowledge of their position as not given, constrains them to remain steadfast and pushful until they overthrow the status quo through mass revolution, thereby securing unfettered freedom for themselves. In the light of the foregoing, this paper will attempt to interpret The Bacchae from Marxist perspective in order to show that not all Soyinka`s plays lack solid class ideology.

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, "firebrigade approach, " poor institutions, lack of meritocracy, blackmail, and violence were the social realities that encumber the flowering of good governance in the country.

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