The Poetry of Power: A Preliminary Examination of Nigeria's 2023 Presidential Election in Song and Oral Poetry

ABSTRACT: This article primarily examines song and oral poetry as a discursive site of critical debates in Nigeria's recent contentious 2023 presidential election and its aftermath. Contending though that a crucial power of popular culture lies in the synchronous mutual validation of its different art forms deployed by likeminded artists, the article also underscores the deployment of several other such art forms like photography, jokes, cartoons, and fashion for political effect in that election. It appraises representative songs and oral poems in Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Bini, Pidgin, and English to engage with the construction of various myths of the leader as hero while also mapping the converse process of the demythologization of erstwhile heroes. The later process is linked to the sober unravelling of the myth of Nigerian democracy by beaming critical light on its untenable key dogmas as well as the censorship laws meant to shield them. It ends with a statement on the divergent trajectories of politics and poetry.