Throughout the war years the Information Officer, Rex Stevens, conducted briefing tours giving lectures on the progress of the war in public reading rooms and churches across Calabar Province. The war effort gave many causes championed in the progressive discourse of the ‘reading public’ a new economic and political imperative. A range of economic issues – the manilla exchange rate, tax collection, school funding and palm oil production – would dominate their concerns, along with a growing list of ‘social ills’ which would fall under their increasingly vigilant and vociferous purview, including court corruption, masquerade violence, child betrothal, human trafficking and juvenile delinquency. Their campaigns were literate, generational, Christian and increasingly nationalist.

The war years witnessed a maturation of ‘progressive’ political discourse expressed by an expanding ‘reading public’. It was not only the educated elites and public letter-writers for whom written English was gaining in importance. An increasing readership of so-called ‘semi-literate’ traders, school-leaver clerks, bureaucrats and servicemen also fostered a new urban popular culture in the form of the ‘Onitsha Market Literature’, a pamphlet literature comprised of images from western cowboy movies, love stories and the adventures of legendary merchants. With a broader base of public opinion to which to appeal, the progressives' tone during the war gained in confidence and authority. The spirit of this moment would link the progressive discourse of the educated elites to the radical nationalist discourse of the would-be trader tycoons and their trans-Atlantic trade schemes. Overall the war witnessed a shift in public opinion from petitioning to censure, and an overtly public sphere was cultivated by the improvement unions, the press and the literary societies.