Abstract

• The 21^st century Nigerian space has incontrovertibly incentivised the fictional writer with abounding dieges that predominantly narrativized the social realism of the author’s society. It is from this mimetic assemblage that Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance (2009) stems from. This paper uses the Postcolonial Theory as an investigative and analytical tool to explore the significance of fictional verisimilitude in communicating the didactic in the Nigerian socio-political and economic situation. Meanwhile, this qualitative research is hinged on the novelist’s representational exactitude of the social realism of the Nigerian space while foregrounding the impact of the family as a social agency on the thematic preoccupation of the e-fraud or hustle narrative. Nwaubani’s novel is insightful and even prophetically rendered to capture the socio-economic fragmentation that has become emblematic of contemporary Nigerian space. This paper further probes the aggressive Nigerian existentialist consciousness ultimately rooted in the e-fraud narrative. This paper implicates the apparatuses of power for their insensibilities to the plight of the Nigerian youth inadvertently and seemingly affecting the demonising image of Nigeria/ns in the global marketplace. Pertinently, Nwaubani strongly provokes a didactic evocation as she foreshadows the place of the family as a retooling moral compass. This paper, therefore foregrounds that, the text ultimately acts as an ethical road map for the re-evaluation and re-charting of the recent moral decadence bedevilling the Nigerian space, especially in the 21^st century city space.