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The thesis is a study in the poetics of the semi-oral, semi-written genre ofYoruba (WesternNigeria) written and radio poetry, encompassing the poetics of being poet and the poetics of being audience. Ewi emerges as a cultural practice that is discursively constituted by its practitioners. Its shared aesthetics is fonnulated around a cluster of concepts in which the "good" and the "beautiful" are intertwined. The study of the poetics of being poet highlights the imagination of ''-poetic beingness", of the art of poetry, and explores how poets create artful texts that are, through a poetics of addressivity, transposed into addressed utterances that provide inhabitable spaces for the reading and listening audience. Being audience of ewi is a generic fonn of cultural practice, reflected in shared ways of engaging with ewi as text, which encompasses strategies of focusing and expanding in making meaning out of poetry, moves of appropriating and re-employing ewi for own uses. The study of the text-ness of ewi epitomizes its being grounded in a poetics of "interface", in which its practitioners draw on all available, intersecting literary and non-literary sources, which they put to creative uses.

This study attempts a socio-cultural approach to ubo-aka musical phenomena in terms of the role of the instrument as a communication medium with rich and varied tradition of its own among the Nri people in Igbo culture of south eastern Nigeria. The Igbo ubp-aka is a plucked idiophone consisting of eight metal prongs which are linguistically tuned with a bowl-shaped gourd resonator. This study is needed in the light of the important socio-cultural roles of ubp-aka musical tradition which are facing the prospect of extermination in the face of social change. The investigation rests primarily on my extensive field work in the music of Nri people from 1966 to 1975 and on current field recordings by Gwamniru Ezegbe and Levi Oji who are my research assistants from 1976 to 1977, in addition to current information on Nri culture from many Nri people. The first chapter introduces the whole thesis by presenting the method of investigation, the problems, the purpose, the academic reason for this study, literary survey and the scope of the study. Chapter 2 describes the Nri people and their culture as they relate to ubo-aka musical tradition. Chapter 3 is an organological study of the instrument based on the systems of Draeger and Hood. The determinants and the socio-cultural roles of ubq-aka music are discussed in ethnographic context which concludes the socio-cultural background to ubo-aka music. Chapter 5 discusses the transcriptions and the analyses using Professor Liang's "graphic space notation" specially designed for ubo-aka music. In the analyses, 30 musical examples that best typify ubo-aka musical tradition in Nri were selected and analyzed in terms of the musical parameters, linguistic content and social functions covering the characteristic scale-modes, the melodic contour typology, the intervalic structures, the correlation between the melodic contour and the speech tones and the rhythms of melody and speech. Chapter 6 concludes the study with recommendations and shows that (1) the melodic contours are linguistically determined by the Igbo tonal language, (2) the rhythms of melody and words do not always agree and (3) that the musical parameters can change but not the socio-cultural roles as defined by the society. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

The main objective of this study is to establish why NEPA has persistently failed to effectively turnaround with a view to recommending an effective corporate turnaround strategy. The corporation has performed very poorly for several decades in both monetary returns and service quality. Several attempts to reverse the situation have failed, thus frustrating the government who own the corporation and the consumers who use its services. To do this we start by building a theoretical framework to learn from experience of other organisations and establish the parameters for performance measurement, necessary for a successful corporate turnaround. Corporate turnaround strategy is only necessary if there is corporate decline. Corporate decline, however, does not occur as one of those things in an organisation but starts in one area and systematically spreads to the other areas. There are two sources of corporate decline, one internal to the company and the other external to it. While the managers may influence the internal causal factors of decline, it is not easy for them to influence the external causal factors of decline. However, good managers may minimise the effects of external factors of decline on their organisation. The main internal cause of corporate decline is management, along with other variables such as finance, organisation structure, bureaucracy and poor management decisions. Most corporate decline situations arise as a result of poor and inefficient management among others which include ineffective financial policy and control, overexpansion and large scale investments without proper costing. Yet. other factors include building.... of high cost structure in an organisation, poor marketing efforts and wrongly judged acquisitions and mergers. NEPA possesses most of these attributes of decline during the period of 1970 to 1992. The key symptoms of declining organisations are grouped in seven basic families of problems which are mainly liquidity, poor debt collection, declining profitability, quality failures, low employee morale and poor organisation structure. To reverse these trends. most turnaround strategies start with change of top management. The new management carries out the restructuring of the rest of the organisation, first by assuring that the organisation has enough funds to function and is heading towards the desired direction. Such actions include assets I reduction, improved cost efficiency and redirected investment. Following the completion of theoretical framework, we carried out field research directed at four stakeholders of NEPA. We drew up and administered a different questionnaire on Residential Consumers, Commercial and Industrial Consumers, NEPA Staff and Other Interest Groups (Ministries and other Parastatals) to capture the perception of these groups on the performance of NEPA. The responses from the questionnaires have been analysed and reported in the study. Our findings show that NEPA is characterised by the indicators of corporate decline such as: • poor management • weak finance team • high cost structure • bureaucracy The combined effect of these is poor performance in product quality and loss of revenue as shown in its operating records. The first attempt to improve product quality of NEPA in 1972 by merging the two bodies (ECN and NDA) into one body failed to produce noticeable effect. The corporation has therefore continued to decline over the years and the consumers had to tolerate the situation as there was no ready alternative source of power supply. Recognising the problem, another attempt to turn NEPA around was made in 1989, by adopting turnaround strategies which involved changing top management and restructuring the organisation. It still did not improve its performance because the new management was not better than the one replaced. The corporation thus continues to decline. Recognising NEPA's operational problems and managerial difficulties, we recommended corporate turnaround strategies that will lessen the burden on the executives and make NEPA an efficient company. We have recommended change of management, preferably with an outsider, as the first step in the corporate turnaround process in NEPA. This step was followed by the recommendation of large scale reorganisation of the industry. The reorganisation involves the formation of a Holding Company out of the current headquarters, with drastically reduced workforce and ten subsidiary companies. Our recommendations involve the creation of a generating company, a national grid company and eight distributing and supplying companies. We appreciate the resource implications of our recommendations, which involves the injection of new funds, new personnel requirement and the government's approval. The subsidiary companies would inherit most of their staffing requirements from the current NEPA staff, except for Distribution and Supply companies, where a large number of new personnel should be employed. The staffing requirements of Distribution and Supply companies will differ from the other companies in the group. The high calibre professional staff needs shall be met by offering appropriate incentives, comparable to those in the private sector. The corporation has already got premises that will house the subsidiary companies and funding will come from both improved operating and financial performance as well as a one off grant from the government. Despite these resource implications, we are convinced that if NEPA is keen to improve on its performance, our recommendations will be the way out for the corporation.

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