Depicting Failed Governance in Postcolonial Nigeria: A Critical Reading of Achebe, Habila and Nwabueze

This paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to interrogate how Achebe, Habila, and Nwabueze deploy narrative language and symbolic representations to expose ideological contradictions within postcolonial Nigerian governance. The texts are analyzed, considering the fact that even after six decades of self-proclaimed independence, the current questions surrounding failed governmental and institutional leadership are not different from the questions asked within its first decade as a nation. Through the CDA lens, the failures of Nigeria’s government regimes and the collective actions of its citizens towards the government will be studied. Findings reveal that the recurring failure in governance is exposed through the inconsistent discourse patterns present at all levels of governance and citizenship as portrayed by the texts. This study concludes that collective discourse is indispensable to the success or failure of decision making in the Nigerian society It recommends a reform of the linguistic and symbolic structures that reproduce governance failure, alongside the use of a transformative discourse to facilitate postcolonial awareness and responsibility