A Literary Pragmatic Exploration of Political Clientelism in Ben Okri's The Famished Road And Ikechukwu Asika's Pimples On Wrinkles

Abstract

Political clientelism remains a persistent obstacle to democratic accountability in postcolonial Africa. This study examines how Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Ikechukwu Asika's Pimples on Wrinkles construct and challenge patronage networks through literary and rhetorical choices. Using speech act theory, Gricean pragmatics, and Kenneth Burke's (1973) concept of literature as equipment for living (which is structured around the proverb function, perspective by incongruity, and the therapeutic function),
the paper investigates how both novels carry out civic work at the level of utterance, narrative structure, and implicature. Three findings emerge. First, both novels use pragmatic devices to encode the structural logic of clientelism: Asika employs face-threatening rhetoric and willful transgressions of the quality maxim, while Okri uses personification and explanatory crowd rebuttals.  Additionally, both employ incongruity to contest the normalisation of patronage: Okri uses the contrast between the community's physical coercion and its verbal clarity, while Asika deploys satirical mapping of public extraction onto the elite body. Third, both serve complementary therapeutic purposes: Asika through structural admonition, and Okri through group exhortation. The study concludes that postcolonial fiction serves as a rhetorically purposeful civic tool for challenging entrenched patronage networks, making a literary pragmatic contribution to African literature and political scholarship.