Environmental Impact Assessment and the Dramatist: A Conceptual Study of Esiaba Irobi's Hagmen Also Die.

The subject of Niger Delta predicament and crisis has been the theme of many editorials and publications in Nigeria and elsewhere. Before the November 10, 1995 execution of Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni environmental activists, for their collective resolve to address certain fundamental interests that affect their common identity and humanity, Esiaba Irobi had, in a spine-chilling tragedy, Hagmen Also Die, painted bizarre and horrifying picture of this society, which is in acute danger of socio-economic and ecological extinction as a result of terrible effect of oil exploitation. In this paper, attempt is made to examine Hagmen Also Die as an impact assessment study. It is he position of the paper that the Niger Delta youths represented in the play as the 'suicide squad', are victims of neglect and peripheral attention, and that as a social class, they turned deviants in order to draw urgent attention to a zone, which supplies the wealth of the nation, but which is in sore state of economic and social development. It is argued that in this play, Irobi demonstrates unreservedly, "the daring involved in naked confrontation with adversaries".