The Nigerian State, War and Youth Disempowerment: Reflections from Fẹmi Adebayọ’s Jagun Jagun 1

Abstract

This study examines how Femi Adebayo deploys character and setting in Jagun Jagun 1 to interrogate the Nigerian state, its habituation to war and youth disempowerment. Deploying postcolonial Marxism as the theoretical lens, the study contends that, although Jagun Jagun's setting is in the pre-colonial Yoruba era, the film is a profound critique of the Nigerian state and its oligarchic elite that uses violence to perpetuate its interests. The film depicts that democracy in Nigeria, as captured in Jagun Jagun, is synonymous with war, state plundering, dictatorship and the precarity of the youth. Jagun Jagun shows that members of the gerontocratic elite promote interpersonal and inter-communal wars to colonise the youths and the masses. The film, however, indicts some Nigerian youths as complicit in their disempowerment as they form alliances with the gerontocratic establishment. The study concludes that Adebayo's artistic engagement with the Nigerian sociopolitical crises in Jagun Jagun represents a significant introspective evaluation that challenges the binary opposition between Western colonisers and the Nigerian ruling class on the one hand, and the gerontocratic Nigerian elite and the disempowered Nigerian youths on the other. Adebayo, thus, calls for genuine democratisation, healthy intergenerational collaboration and inclusion as alternative strategies for achieving democratic governance in Nigeria.