ABSTRACT
When, in 1960, Nigeria was granted independence from colonial rule, it was thought that the country was going to be a model of a brilliant experience in parliamentary democracy; but less than six years after the supposed license for self-rule, a military coup struck which lay to rest the dreams of most people. From that coup, the nation has gone through a civil war and several upheavals of varying dimensions while its potentials have nosedived and its people, despite the immense human and natural resources of the country, barely live above the poverty line. This sad situation has, for years, attracted several reactions from people of different social classes. One class that has often been ignored in the Nigerian socio-political conversation is the ever-growing horde of Arabic verse-smiths that use the Arabic language as their medium of registering their reactions to national challenges. Using Shaykh Ma’ruf Ahmad al-Ajahwi as a representational model, this study examines Shaykh’s poem “Naijīriyya fi ām al sittīn” (Nigeria at Sixty); it places his thoughts and sentiments within the general matrix of Nigerian socio-political discourse and posits that the poem indeed represents the true yearnings of the average Nigerian who daily suffers owing to bad policies of the government. It goes further to reflect on the challenge of democracy and development in their global context as well as the particularistic expressions of both concepts in a developing country like Nigeria and opines that the average Nigerian is more concerned about good governance and not necessarily the nomenclature given to a system of government.
Keywords: Social realism, Democracy, Arabic poetic loup, Sustainable development, and Insecurity.
Citation: Timehin SO. (2021). A toddler at 60? Nigerian’s democracy and development under Arabic poetic loupe, Br. J. Arts Humanit., 3(4), 149-158. https://doi.org/10.34104/bjah.02101490158
