Crises of Civil Governance and Military Intervention in Postcolonial Nigerian Drama: Towards a Sustainable Democracy in Africa

Contemporary African drama has been deeply shaped by the continent’s turbulent political history, particularly the oscillation between democratic experiment and successive military regimes. African playwrights have consistently deployed the stage as a site of political critique, social memory, and ideological resistance. This paper interrogates how Nigerian drama portrays the bane of democracy—its failures, contradictions, betrayals—and the traumatising legacies of military interventions, with a view to projecting principles for sustaining democracy in Africa. The study adopts qualitative research design, situating dramatic texts within Africa’s socio-historical and political evolution of postcolonial governance. It draws theoretical insights from Achille Mbembe’s postcolonial theory as interpretive lens to critically discuss selected plays. Three Nigerian plays—Femi Osofisan’s The Discombobulation of a Rookie Patriot, Rasaki Ojo Bakare’s Rogbodiyan, and Ben Tomoloju’s Jankariwo—are purposively selected for analysis based on their ample exemplifications of democratic governance, depiction of the crises of democracy, and the culmination of their plots into military coups and/or rules. The paper avers that the crises of African postcolonial democracy are marked by “the mutual ‘zombification’ of the rulers and those they rule”—the unhealthy cooperation or intimacy between rulers and subjects which sustains democratic crises through complicity, fear, popular acquiescence, civic apathy, and normalisation of corruption. It maintains that African dramatists not only document political failures, but also foreground the ethical imperatives of social justice, collective responsibility, and conscientious participation of the people in sustaining democratic institutions in Africa. The study concludes that postcolonial African drama serves as an archive of historical memory and sociopolitical commentary, offering a critique of state power while imagining and projecting the imperatives for sustainable democracy.