MILITARY GENERALS AND THE EVOLVING NIGERIAN DEMOCRACY: A READING OF IDRIS AMALI’S “GENERALS WITHOUT WAR” AND ODIA IFEIMUN’S “GO TELL THE GENERALS”.

ABSTRACT Nigerian poetry has continued to be an artistic medium for a critical response to the chasm that exists between the leaders and the led in Nigeria. In this premise, the poets often emerges as the oracle of the masses, taking a position that enables them to declaim the moral and ethical failures of those in position of leadership. Idris Amali and Odia Ifeimun, as it is demonstrated in their collections, Generals without war. (2000), and Go tell the Generals, are such poets, Equipped with what we may call the aesthetic of resistance, manifested in the dominant tone of anger in their poetry. Amali and Odia confront the soldiers who hopped into power in the heady days of militarization in Nigeria and eventually plundered the nation. This study examines Amali and odia's strengths as political poets engaged in the duty of combating the soldiers and at the same time offering hope to the victims of military oppression in the decades that spanned the early 1980s to the late 1990's.