Youths and negative steps in a depressed economy: X-raying Toni Duruaku’s <i> A mirage for a dream</i>

Abstract

The trending word in Nigeria today is “recession”. This national condition affects the educational, political, religio-cultural, and social institutions. Global recessions have occurred since World War 11; in 1975, 1982, 1991 and 2009. During these recession periods, many Asian countries did not suffer greatly because they had robust economies and gained from the falling prices in goods and services; while the most affected were countries with chronic  financial liquidity issues and commodity imports dependency. However, the collapse of the Nigerian economy, both the real GDP and the nominal GDP, is  somewhat engaging, because diverse survival strategies have been adopted by the masses. The fact is that, though a majority of Nigerian youths  believes in ‘migrating to Europe, a handful of the youths engage themselves in one menial job or the other. The system presents us with humorous,  disturbing and illuminating characters; hence, creative artists would have to “think out of the box”, by pointing ways forward even under difficult  situations. This paper examines Toni Duruaku’s A Mirage for a Dream, a play that problematises emigration from Africa. The method of research is content  analysis the play text, aided by library research and observation. Furthermore, Lee MaGaan’s persuasion theory is adopted for the conceptual  framework. The paper concludes that a greater number of youths fail in their quest for survival because of unhealthy competition, assumptions and  other people’s perceptions. The finding is that crime has become a recurring decimal in the conquest against economic depression. The researcher   recommends that survival in a depressed economy requires a robust and deliberate reorientation of the youths.