Literature is said to be the index for measuring social commitment both for the artist and the society it seeks to sanitise, and by this, Abiigbo, as a traditional oral performance for social commentaries becomes relevant. This study investigated Abiigbo in relation to revolutionary advocacy, as it affects the leadership and followership styles in our contemporary Nigerian society. An attempt was made to analyse the language features of Abiigbo in order to expose and express the realities of our time, using the functionalist and descriptive linguistic approaches. It argues that Abiigbo is an oral performance that uses singing, chanting, dancing and miming modes to make social commentaries. The study reveals that Abiigbo uses satire, lament and protest as thematic devices to lend itself to revolutionary advocacy. The study identifies the use of metaphors, repetitions, parallelisms, and rhetorical questions as major literary devices employed by Abiigbo poets in explicating revolutionary advocacy. The paper holds that since satiric poetries like Abiigbo are informative, educative and entertaining, as well as have the capacity to instill discipline in the younger generations at early childhood development; it should be incorporated as a dominant aspect of citizenship education in the school curricula.

Keywords: Abiigbo, Mbaise Igbo, revolutionary advocacy, social commitment, functionalist and descriptive linguistics.