CC BY
71Research
A critical stylistic analysis of Olusegun
, „ , Artide
Obasanjo s press statement The Way out:
A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria
Movement"
Rebecca Ibukunoluwa Adugbe
Abstract
This article examines Obasanjo's use of language in a political discourse confronting an incumbent president preparatory to the 2019 presidential election in Nigeria. The article characterises the press statement as a model of a subgenre of political discourse called elite discourse. It adopts Jeffries' Critical Stylistics to tease out the linguistic resources underlying ideology in discourse. It discusses three ideological issues on the state of the nation and the proposed political reform required for the advancement of Nigeria's democracy. These ideological issues centre on true leadership, the poor state of the nation and citizen's responsibility. The study shows that the linguistic choices in the text largely present a particular view of the world which seeks to promote the ideology of acting in national interests. It also reveals that knowledge production in the text is commodified for political advantage which could be contested in counter-discourses that seek to provide alternative facts in the political situation.
Keywords
discourse; democracy; ideology; open letter; power play; critical stylistics
Received:
16 December 2020 Reviewed: 13 March 2021 Accepted: 1 June 2021 Published: 28 June 2021
UDC: 8142
Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, 220005, Nigeria Corresponding author:
Rebecca Ibukunoluwa Adugbe (Ms.), omoadugbe@gmail.com
For citation:
Adugbe, Rebecca Ibukunoluwa. 2021. "A critical stylistic analysis of Olusegun Obasanjo's press statement 'The Way out: A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria Movement'." Language. Text. Society 8 (1). https://ltsj.online/2021-08- 1-adugbe.
Language. Text. Society
Vol. 8 No. 1, 2021
ISSN 2687-0487
Introduction
The All Progressives Congress (APC) and its presidential candidate General Muhammadu Buhari during the 2015 presidential election campaign made some promises to Nigerians, which were anchored on three cardinal areas of national interest: fighting corruption, security of lives and property, and provision of employment. All these promises were encapsulated in the change agenda of the party. With the impression that the People's Democratic Party (PDP) had misruled the country for about sixteen years after the restoration of democracy in 1999, the APC change agenda became a selling point with which it wrested power from the then ruling party, the first 'power shift' of its kind in Nigeria's democratic history. Following the electoral victory of the APC, there was the anticipation that there would be a remarkable departure from the supposed lackluster governance style of previous administrations and a radical shift towards realistic policy initiatives and implementation which would address the myriads of socio-political and economic problems confronting the country.
However, within two years into the four-year tenure of the Buhari administration, Nigerians had started assessing the performance of the government, using economic indices such as job loss, increased poverty level, dwindling foreign exchange value, among others. And a cross-section of the populace had started scoring the government low and expressing serious political disaffection with the APC and its actors. Criticisms of the government grew from time to time on the social media as members of the online community expressed serious reservations about the performance of the administration. Even social and political leaders lent their voices to the situation in the country, charging the government to arrest the downward trend. As if the government was not sensitive enough to these checks, there were insinuations by late 2017 that President Muhammadu Buhari would seek re-election in the 2019 general elections.
Of all the voices that rose to oppose the incumbent's bid to seek re-election in 2019, the press statement that former President Olusegun Obasanjo released to oppose President Muhammadu Buhari generated a lot of ripples in the polity. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo titles the press statement 'The Way out: A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria Movement'1 wherein he reflects on the state of the nation under the Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) government, expresses serious reservations about the competence of the President to handle policy matters, and proposes the formation of a movement he calls Coalition for Nigeria (CN). It is this highly explosive press statement that we seek to analyse stylistically in this study with a view to investigating Obasanjo's use of language in a political discourse confronting an incumbent president in the run-up to a presidential election. The specific objectives of the study are to: (i) identify the ideologies shared by the writer in the text to depict the state of the nation and his proposed agenda of political reform; (ii) analyse the linguistic choices deployed to express the ideologies in the text; and (iii) assess the medium of press statements as a site of struggle to attain or retain power in a democracy.
Literature review
Language provides a finely articulated vehicle for differences in discourse, power and social structures. Wodak (2002) states that ideologies are manifested in a discourse through language. Thompson (1990) refers to ideology as social forms and processes within which, and by means of which, symbolic forms circulate in the social world. Van Dijk (2006a) views ideology as a sociocognitive notion which is defined as shared representations of social groups, and more specifically as the axiomatic principles of such representations. With a sociocognitive foundation, ideologies are gradually
1 Obasanjo, Olusegun. 2018. "The Way Out: A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria Movement." The Punch Newspaper, January 24.
acquired and sometimes change through life or a life period. Wodak (2002) sees ideology as an important means of establishing and maintaining unequal power relations. For Fairclough (2009), ideology is considered to contribute to addressing the social wrongs of the day, by analysing their sources and causes, resistance to them, and possibility of overcoming them.
Van Dijk (2009) calls attention to a simplified notion of ideology in our day-to-day activities almost always used in a derogatory sense, especially when characterising the ideas or policies of others. It is interesting to understand that even such a derogatory use of the notion of ideology is itself ideological if it expresses a polarisation between an in-group and an out-group as pointed out by van Dijk. It is noteworthy that ideologies are not used only to dominate or oppress others, but also to resist and struggle against such domination. It is not a stable phenomenon in that what seems to be a liberating ideology today may be an oppressive one tomorrow (van Dijk, 2009). In the same light, Tsaaior (2009) opines that ideology can be construed to mean a body of dominant ideas, values and knowledge grids that influence the thought and processes of individuals, groups, classes and so on. There are various symbolic forms in which meaning is constructed and conveyed. Thompson (2009) states that one of them is discourse which establishes or sustains relations of domination and serves as a concrete realisation of abstract forms of knowledge. Fairclough (2006) sees discourse as a way of representing some part or aspect of the world characterised by some specific vocabulary or grammar features. Wodak (2002) emphasises the importance of discourse claiming that discourse is socially consequential and gives rise to important issues of power. Discursive practice may have major ideological effects in that they may help produce and/or reproduce unequal power relations. Wodak (2002) asserts that discourse may generate or arouse the production of ideologies and power relations between social classes and political classes through which they represent things and positions of people. Van Dijk (2009) submits that many experiences and discourses are usually necessary to acquire or change ideologies.
To Jeffries (2010), there is no possibility that any discourse is free of ideology. Each discourse is with its own ideologies and themes. Foucault (1983) argues that themes in discourses only occupy the smallest possible space between thought and speech. Speeches are simply thoughts made visible by means of words. Said (1983) posits that each discourse is to some degree jargon, a language of control and a set of institutions within the culture over what it constitutes as its special domain. The ideology behind discourse is simply power. There is an undoubted relationship or interconnectedness between power and discourse. Foucault (1983) asserts that discourse is enmeshed within power and Parker (1992) sees discourse as reproducing power relations. Chilton (2004); Bayram (2010) consider discourse as a struggle for power - power is about relations of difference, and particularly about the effects of differences in social and political structures. Discourses can also be used to resist and critique power. Chilton (2004) likens this to the micro level of political discourse. Wodak and Koller (2008) opine that discourse can be used to critique assertions such as power, knowledge and dominance with a view to transforming them into more construction of realities. Chilton (2004) submits that as political process typically involves persuasion and bargaining, so is political discourse. Emeka-Nwobia (2016) corroborates this that political discourse is primarily focused on persuading people to take specified political actions or to make crucial political decisions. Language plays a prominent role in persuading people. Taiwo (2008) states that language plays an important role in the process of manifesting concrete will and transforming it into concrete social action in discourse. This is then an indication that actions, social or political, are influenced and prepared by language.
Material and methods
The data for the study is Olusegun Obasanjo's press statement titled 'The Way out: A Clarion Call for Coalition for Nigeria Movement' which was directed to the Presidency but which by its nature as an open letter was generally shared in the public domain. The press statement was sourced from Punch Online newspaper of 24th January 2018. The press statement was selected for analysis because it was a documented (written) political text which generated a lot of debate in the political space as to the worthiness or otherwise of the incumbent to seek re-election in the 2019 presidential election given the supposed poor implementation of the APC agenda in the first term of the incumbent. The press statement is composed of 22 paragraphs that capture diverse political issues which reflect the state of the nation under the APC government and an assessment of the party leader's response to serious socio-economic and political issues. Relevant extracts were sampled from a fraction of about one-third of the 22 paragraphs. These extracts were purposively sampled to capture cogent themes such as party performance, alleged violation of democratic norms, leadership responsibilities versus ineptitude, and political consciousness and citizenship responsibilities. The analysis further employs a qualitative method whereby significant stylistic markers are subjected to description and interpretation of the political context in which they are used. The theoretical orientation used in analysing this data is Jeffries' critical stylistic tools.
Simpson (2004) explains that the reason language is so important to stylisticians is because the various forms and patterns that constitute the linguistic structures are important functions of the text. McRae and Clark (2004) posit that stylisticians explore authority, power, and inequality in the text in stylistic analysis. Hence, Jeffries (2010) has developed a strand of stylistics which, according to her, modifies Fairclough's stages of CDA. Jeffries' Critical Stylistics is a synthesis of Linguistic Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which brings together a broad understanding of attitudes behind a text. It aims at bringing the rigour and textual focus of stylistics to the analysis of non-literary texts with a view to identifying the ideological underpinnings of such texts (Jeffries 2014). It focuses on the ideological aspect of the linguistic features to be found in texts and fetching out implicit systematic meaning within the text.
Critical stylistics provides models which give insights into contextual features of ideological meanings in the text. That is, it draws out ideologies that underpin the ideational meaning of the text. Critical Stylistics, according to Jeffries (2010), analyses the contextual and technical use of linguistic features in texts. It as well deals with how the text uses the resources of language to represent a particular view of the world. Jeffries submits that her model for the purpose of doing Critical Stylistics is:
[...] to provide tools to analyse the different ways in which texts allow/ask us to conceptualise those topics they are addressing, and to provide some means of accessing this representational practice through the linguistic features that are already well-described in very many semantic-grammatical theories and models (2010, 6).
Critical Stylistics, as Jeffries and McIntyre (2010) posit, is an attempt to put textual-conceptual meaning at the centre of the theory of language. The textual-conceptual functions of texts are the basis of critical stylistic analysis. Textual-conceptual functions are simply the combination of textual (which is called triggers) and ideational function. These functions are re-contextualised by Jeffries (2014) into an overall framework of textual meaning. Jeffries proposes a new set of tools which stems from Fairclough's (1989) three dimensions which he also calls 'stages' of CDA:
Description is the stage which is concerned with formal properties of the text.
Interpretation is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction-with seeing the text as a product or process of production, and as a resource in the product of interpretation [...]
Explanation is concerned with the relation between interaction and social context - the social determination of the process of production and interpretation, and their social effects (Jeffries 2010, 11).
Jeffries explains that the main area of interest of CDA is the process of explaining how texts fit into the sociopolitical landscape in which they are produced and read. To this end, Jeffries gives some set of tools which function in a similar way to each other, and cover the ground suggested by Fairclough. These tools, as Jeffries (2010, 15) asserts, are to answer questions of what any text is 'doing'. The tools are, but not limited to the following:
• Naming and Describing explores how individual texts may choose from the regular resources of the language in representing a view of the world. It is the linguistic process by which people, places and things are typically identified in language, including ways in which such entities can be characterised.
• Representing Actions/Events/States deals with the strand of meaning that relates most clearly to the verbal element of the clause. It also presents information on what is being done (action), what is happening (events), or what simply is (state).
• Equating and contrasting involves constructing what texts (or authors) see as equivalent and what they see as contrasting.
• Exemplifying and enumerating handles the potential ideological effect of exemplifying and enumerating.
• Prioritising examines the possibilities of prioritising some information or commenting on others.
• Implying and assuming views how assumptions and implications are used to make ideologies appear to be common sense.
• Negating deals with how most texts produced depict the picture of the world (usually what is not the case).
• Hypothesising considers the hypothetical situations of modality.
• Presenting others' speech and thoughts accesses the viewpoint of the participants who are discussed in a text, but whose voice and thought are mediated by the narrating voice of the text.
In sum, Jeffries' Critical Stylistics is in a tradition of bringing the best of stylistics and critical linguistics together. It is concerned with stylistic choices, and the textual analysis which can illuminate the choices that a text producer has made, whether consciously or not. Thus, some of these tools that are considered significant will be applied in this study to provide technical linguistic details which support contextual considerations in the text.
Results and discussion
In this section, we have three subsections each devoted to an ideology expressed in the press statement to share a particular world view with the reader.
Poor State of the Nation in a Government that Promised Change is an Aberration
Obasanjo starts off his press statement with the ideology which expresses the idea that it is unacceptable for the Nigerian society to have degenerated further under the administration that
promised the people change. First, Obasanjo seeks to arouse the interest of the audience by providing the rationale for issuing the special statement which attacks the policies of the Buhari/APC administration, thereby challenging its bid for re-election in 2019:
(1) Some of you may be asking, "What has brought about this special occasion of Obasanjo issuing a Special Statement?" You will be right to ask such a question. But there is a Yoruba saying that 'when lice abound in your clothes, your fingernails will never be dried of blood. When I was in the village, to make sure that lice die, you put them between two fingernails and press hard to ensure they die and they always leave blood stains on the fingernails. To ensure you do not have blood on your fingernails, you have to ensure that lice are not harboured anywhere within your vicinity. (Paragraph 1)
The stylistic tool Obasanjo uses to arouse the interest of the audience in this extract is presenting others' speech and thought in: 'Some of you may be asking, "What has brought about this special occasion of Obasanjo issuing a Special Statement?" This rhetorical question in the form of a direct speech whereby the writer merges his voice with that of others is an attempt to persuade them. It gives the audience the room for critical engagement without creating the impression that Obasanjo is the only thinker or always wanting to lord his views over his audience. This is a rhetorical strategy of esteeming the audience as critical minds who can equally mentally engage the audience in the task of interrogating national affairs. It is, however, interesting to note that one who controls the discourse manipulates the audience. Thus, Obasanjo provides the audience with a range of issues to think about and act on. In this regard, he stylistically uses the adversative 'but in: 'But there is a Yoruba saying that ...' which exemplifies the critical stylistic tool of contrasting. With the contrastive syntactic trigger 'but', Obasanjo directs the audience to the crux of the matter, which is doing the needful in order to get the desired result in a society which finds itself in a crisis situation.
Obasanjo's use of the stylistic tool of representing actions and events in the use of the verbs of force 'put and 'press' and the adverb of degree 'hard' is rhetorically engaging. First, the verbs underline the resistance force with which he conceives how the people are to quash the metaphorical lice in Nigeria's political system. Second, the verbs give us an insight into Obasanjo's military background as a retired General who had fought in the Nigerian Civil War as a Commander, as these verbs sound rather combative. His combative tone in this extract reminds one of the saying that nothing good comes easy. Success or freedom is not without a price. To get the expected result, a lot of efforts or sacrifices are made. In other words, to change the present 'change' to the desired 'change', Obasanjo realises that it may not be easy, hence the use of the adverb of degree 'hard' in 'press hard' the 'lice'. As expected, in pressing hard, blood will flow but the blood in the present context does not suggest people losing their lives by taking to violence to wrest power from the Buhari administration. Although the road to freedom may involve laying down some lives as even suggested in the title of one of Femi Osofisan's plays Red is the Freedom Road, what blood typifies metaphorically in the present text are the unpleasant experiences which should be wiped out of the people's lives in the Nigerian environment. These experiences will be analysed in detail in excerpt two below:
(2) The lice of poor performance in government—poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed—if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality—are very much with us today. (Paragraph 2)
Let us recall Obasanjo's invocation of village experience with the use of the circumstantial adjunct of time 'when I was in the village' in Excerpt 1 and the attendant unwholesome experience. It is interesting how he links such experience with the Nigerian situation in the second extract above. The use of the adverbial of present time 'today' in Excerpt 2 in 'The lice of performance in government [...] are very much with us today' negatively labels the Buhari government or the APC administration as one that has taken the country back on a journey of retrogression instead of climbing the ladder of progress or development. Portraying the perceived degeneration in the polity, the writer uses the critical stylistic tool of exemplifying and enumerating by highlighting the supposed ills in the Nigerian society in the form of 'poverty', 'insecurity, 'nepotism', and 'gross dereliction of duty'.
Given the use of the umbrella word 'lice' which breeds 'poverty', 'insecurity', 'nepotism', 'gross dereliction of duty', we can see a kind of class membership relationship in semantic analysis under the lexical relationship known as hyponymy. A hyponym is a relation of inclusion that operates among a group of words. That is, it includes the meaning of a more general word (Goded Rambaud, 2011). Therefore, 'lice' is used as a superordinate term, while the supposed vices in society are the co-hyponyms. The hyponym and the co-hyponyms illustrate the writer's claim of the poor state of the nation under the Buhari/APC-led administration. Physically, the presence of lice in one's clothes is like a thorn in the flesh, as it brings absolute discomfort. In the same vein, depicting these societal problems as lice in the clothes of Nigerian citizens is indicative of how the people feel discomfort under the APC/Buhari administration. In the light of this depiction, the audience are likely to be ready to get rid of these 'lice' in their 'body' by forceful means as suggested with the combative tone of the first extract we analysed.
The writer further deploys the critical stylistic tool of naming and describing with the use of repetition in Excerpt 2 above. The repetition of the adjective 'poor' in 'poor performance', 'poor economic management', and 'poor management to describe the All Progressives Congress' (APC's) change agenda is emphatic. Kulo (2009, 7) cites Jones and Wareing (1999) and submits that repeating certain phrases contributes towards making the ideas in them seem 'common sense'. Charteris-Black (2011) posits that repetition in politics is to initiate an argument, to emphasise an argument and to reinforce the argument. Hence, Obasanjo's repetition of the adjective 'poor' in excerpt two is to emphasise and reinforce degeneration in an administration that promised 'change'.
The next section analyses aspects of prevalent national problems where the incumbent who rode to power on the back of being 'Mr. Integrity' has supposedly faltered.
True Leadership Entails Living above Board
It is intriguing how the speaker gives an impression of having been disappointed with the body language of the President with respect to handling some cases of graft perpetrated by some political figures. Such a picture of the President is at variance with the image he has caught for himself as having zero tolerance for indiscipline and corruption. Obasanjo laments:
(3) But there are three other areas where president Buhari has come out more glaringly than most of us thought we knew about him. One is nepotic deployment bordering on clannishness (boldface original) and inability to bring discipline to bear on errant members of his nepotic court. This has grave consequences on performance of his government to the detriment of the nation. It would appear that national interest was being sacrificed on the altar of nepotic interest. (Paragraph 9)
Obasanjo draws the attention of the reader to the national malaise of nepotism which he claims Buhari is guilty of by engaging the critical stylistic tool of naming and describing. He, therefore,
graphologically boldfaces the assertion 'one is nepotic deployment bordering on clannishness' to draw the attention of the reader to how grave the issue is. Citing Halliday et al. (1964), Gomez-Jimenez (2015, 73) submits that 'graphology is a term that includes orthography, punctuation, and anything else that is concerned with showing how a language uses its graphic to carry its grammatical and lexical patterns'. Alowonle (2016, 41) explains that 'graphology is the arrangement of words to denote their meanings'. While trying to show the possible effects of nepotism on the workings of government, the writer uses the adjective 'grave' in the nominal group 'grave consequences on performance of his government to the detriment of the nation' Beside the stylistic use of the adjective in this nominal group, another nominal group 'performance of his government' which is the object of the preposition 'on' shows how leadership ineptitude could have a spiral effect on the delivery of campaign promises. This picture gives the impression that the government might not have been able to pursue its change agenda vigorously because of this weakness on the part of the President. To further underline the fact that it is the system that suffers when friends and cronies of the President enjoy the benefits of nepotism, the writer injects the object of the preposition 'the detriment of the nation' in 'to the detriment of the nation' into the structure of the naming. Also, the use of the modal auxiliary verb 'would' is stylistic as it helps the writer to strengthen the assumption that it is the system that suffers after all. Here, Jeffries' stylistic tool of implying and assuming is relevant.
It is interesting to note that the text producer could be taken up as to the veracity of his claim above, as it may be just a belief for which there are no proofs. Therefore, for Obasanjo to buttress his point, he employs the critical stylistic tool of exemplifying and enumerating as shown in the excerpt below:
(4) What does one make of a case like that of Maina: collusion, condonation, ineptitude, incompetence, dereliction of responsibility or kinship and friendship on the part of those who should have taken visible and deterrent disciplinary action? (Paragraph 9)
Obasanjo in this excerpt uses a rhetorical figure where the speaker asks a question and allows the audience to figure it out. Such a pattern resonates with the views expressed by van Dijk's (2016) macro-level of cognition which has to do with socially shared knowledge, attitudes, ideologies and norms. Thus, the writer does not assume the sole responsibility of judging the situation alone but also invites the audience to think along, as he offers them a range of what to base their judgement on with the enumeration of the inactions of the President or the Presidency in the pattern of naming and describing. This is similar to a courtroom discourse where charges against an accused are being reeled off by the presiding judge: 'collusion, condonation, ineptitude, incompetence, dereliction of responsibility, or kinship and friendship'. Shall we imply then that the text producer appears to bring the person of the President to an open court where the people based on their socially shared knowledge can by themselves decide if the President has acted rightly or wrongly?
With close reference to how the supposed posture of the Presidency does not favour its anticorruption stance in the change agenda, the text producer further wonders:
(5) There were serious allegations of round-tripping against some inner caucus of the Presidency which would seem to have been condoned. I wonder if such actions do not amount to corruption and financial crime, then what is it? Culture of condonation and turning blind eye will cover up rather than clean up. And going to justice must be with clean hands. (Paragraph 7)
Interrogating the change professed by the Buhari-APC led administration that promises to tackle corruption in the country, the writer employs the critical stylistic tool of implying and assuming
with the use of modality in the modal auxiliary verb 'would' followed by the copula verb of probability 'seem'. With this stylistic tool, the writer appears to distance himself from passing an outright judgement of condemnation on the Presidency or the President himself. His tentative tone to provoke the minds of the audience in the extract is anchored on the choice of the verb of cognition ' wonder' in 'I wonder if such actions do not amount to corruption and financial crime, then what is it?' The subtlety with which Obasanjo condemns the Presidency here is rhetorically compelling given the use of the adverbial clause of condition 'if such actions do not amount to corruption and financial crime' and the rhetorical question 'then what is it?' which implicitly drives home the final judgement of outright condemnation.
The antonymous relation between the phrasal verbs 'cover up' and 'clean up' in the sentence 'Culture of condonation and turning blind eye will cover up rather clean up' tends to draw the attention of the audience to what a change agenda which seeks to fight corruption ought to do 'clean up' and what it supposedly does 'cover[s] up' to emphasise that nothing has really departed from the past posture to corruption in the system. This situation reminds one of what is known in the Nigerian parlance as 'business as usual'. Therefore, to impress it upon the APC-led government that the latter action 'clean up' and not the former 'cover up' is what a change agenda should pursue, the speaker uses the modal auxiliary 'must' to express compulsion and not obligation. The context in which this modal 'must' is used is to enforce authority on government that pursues a change agenda is stylistically significant as seen in the charge: 'And going to justice must be with clean hands'. This charge is a rhetorical appeal to a popular dictum in the legal world which has also become commonplace in popular discourses to underline transparency in human affairs. Apart from the dictum being a legal allusion, it also has an intertextual reference to the Holy Bible as recorded in Psalm 24:3-4 'Who shall ascend into the hills of the LORD? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity nor sworn deceitfully' By using a charge which has roots not only in legal books but also in a holy book to call the APC government to order in this extract, Obasanjo rhetorically tries to criminalise the Presidency and the APC government and in so doing distances them from the audience.
In the section that follows, the speaker tries to charge the audience to rise up to the challenge in the system by holding their leaders accountable for their words and deeds thereafter in order to serve as checks and balances for democratic consolidation.
Citizenship Responsibility is Vital to Consolidating Democratic Ideals
In every society, there are responsibilities expected of both the leaders and the citizens. Therefore, the respective classes must play their parts well for the development of society. Obasanjo charges his readers on their responsibility for a better Nigeria and a desired change in the excerpt below:
(6) Democracy is sustained and measured not by leaders doing extra-ordinary things (invariably, leaders fail to do ordinary things very well), but by citizens rising up to do ordinary things extra ordinarily well. Our democracy, development and progress at this juncture require ordinary citizens of Nigeria to do the extra-ordinary things of changing the course and direction of our lackluster performance and development. (Paragraph 16)
The stylistic devices significant in the above excerpt are negation, contrasting and repetition. While drawing attention to the agents of change in society, the writer counteracts the popular opinion in society about leaders being the sole architects of development in society. He opts for negation in the
syntactic structure '... not by leaders ... but by citizens' where the subject of discussion 'democracy' has already been prioritised at the beginning of the sentence for emphasis. It is interesting that the negation helps enhance the writer's bid to dispense with the agents he is not advocating (leaders) and substitute them with his preferred agents (citizens) which is the crux of his exhortation to his readers. It is not only the agents of nurturing democratic ideals that are contrasted in the excerpt; the verbs which depict the roles of the respective agents in society also contrast for rhetorical effect. In the case of the given information about leadership responsibility in 'not by leaders doing extra ordinary things (invariably, leaders fail to do ordinary things very well)the familiar action word 'do' is used. However, in the new information where citizens are charged to renew their thinking about the task of nurturing democracy in Nigeria, the verb form takes a new structure from just 'doing' to 'rising up to do'. In this verbal group, the infusion of the verb 'rising up' into the original action verb 'to do' suggests a kind of reorientation, renewal of mindset, leaving a kind of comfort zone or staying aloof into stepping into fulfilling obligations which would invariably cancel out the hitherto lethargy or apathy on the path of the citizens to contributing to democratic development in Nigeria.
Beside the negation and contrast devices explained above, repetition of the words 'ordinary' and 'extra ordinary' in the extract is used for emphasis. The first instance of the use of adjective 'extraordinary' to qualify the noun head 'things' resonates with the kind of expectations that people have about leaders having a magic wand which they wield in a political office to turn things around for good. When they fail to wield the so-called magic wand people feel disillusioned and express their disappointment in the leadership. In fact, the sense of disillusionment is presented as being uncalled for by the writer with the parenthetical expression 'invariably, leaders fail to do ordinary things very well'. So, the writer seems to write off the leadership by giving the impression that if they do not do 'ordinary things well' how would they be expected to do 'extra ordinary' things? Thus, the use of the adversative conjunction 'but before the prepositional group 'by citizens' to announce the agents in the discourse is stylistically compelling. Equally stylistic is the repetition of the verb ' do' but varied when used with the respective agents: 'leaders fail to do' vs 'citizens rising up to' where the former suggests incapacity and the latter suggests potential. The juxtaposition of the contrastive verbs also underline Obasanjo's polarisation of the unsuccessful vs promising, and undesirable vs desirable. The potential in the citizens and the confidence the writer has in them are further underlined in the use the adverbs 'extra ordinarily well' to modify the verb 'rising up to do'. Finally, the repetition of the adjective 'ordinary' to qualify certain nouns in the extract assumes a pun-like effect: from 'ordinary things' to 'ordinary citizens' where the writer seems to play upon the adjective to underline his implicit confidence of bringing out the tangible out of the seeming 'ordinary'. Whereas 'ordinary' is used to paint a picture of the status quo in terms of the situation and the agents of change, there is a leap from that 'ordinary' level to a desired turn around in the system where '... ordinary citizens of Nigeria ... do extra ordinary things ...'. Obasanjo's charge to the 'ordinary citizens' reminds the reader of the famous quotation by John F. Kennedy 'Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country'.
The critical stylistic tool of naming and describing whereby the extra ordinary things the citizens should do are post-modified in the nominal group ' the extra-ordinary things of changing the course and direction of our lackluster performance and development' is stylistic. The post-modifying element 'of changing the course and direction of our lackluster performance and development' contains a gerund ('changing' indicating the anticipated transformation or metamorphosis of the status quo), noun heads ('course and direction' indicating the status quo which is underlined in the post-modifying element 'of our lackluster performance and development'). The strange collocation of attributing the 'extra ordinary' to the citizens instead of the leadership is stylistically engaging. Ordinarily, one would expect the leader to do the 'extraordinary' things given their elevated position. But surprisingly,
Obasanjo wittily exposes the supposed ineptitude of leaders in a bid to emphasise the negative description of the leadership.
To see the positive change contrary to the supposed negative situation being experienced, Obasanjo enlightens and encourages his readers by employing the stylistic tool of hypothesising. Jeffries (2010, 114) makes it clear that many texts reflect the speaker's or writer's view of how the world is or might be, how it ought to be or how they wish it was.
(7) Today, Nigeria needs all hands on deck. All hands of men and women of goodwill must be on deck. We need all hands to move our country forward. (Paragraph 18)
Obasanjo employs the stylistic tool of prioritising in his use of the temporal deictic element 'today' which is suggestive of an immediate action or urgency in 'Today, Nigeria needs all hands on deck' to mark a clean break from the tradition to the transition/transformation desired. Fronting the element 'today' resonates with Jeffries' (2010) analytical tool of prioritising. Jeffries (2010, 86) submits that putting something at a higher syntactic level may mean that it is more important. Therefore, the element that is fronted is given prominence in the information structure of the sentence. The writer further uses the analytical tool of hypothesising with the determiner 'all' before the noun 'hands' to engineer solidarity among the ordinary citizens whose imagination he is trying to fire up for nurturing Nigeria's democracy. Jeffries (2010, 114) explains that although such a determiner (all) is used, it is still hypothetical. This is because 'wherever the text producer's option about the truth or desirability of a process is expressed, the envisaged situation or process itself is somewhat hypothetical'. In other words, the determiner 'all' is just an assumption that Obasanjo takes for granted as there would actually be some of his audience who may not share his ideals.
Engaging Jeffries' (2010) analytical tool of naming and describing after the determiner ' all', Obasanjo describes the 'hands' by using a post-modifying element 'of men and women of goodwill' whereby he seeks to harp on the values of loyalty and commitment to national development for realistic results to be achieved. The repetition of the quantifier 'all' in 'all hands' is used to emphasise Obasanjo's solidarity engineering drive where he also seeks to appeal to gender sensibilities with his use of the additive conjunction 'and' in the nominal group 'men and women'. The inclusion of the women folk is rhetorically compelling because in an African setting like Nigeria where women's role in national development is often downplayed, it would be pleasing to the social and political activists to see the writer emphasise that women too have something to offer. Furthermore, the modal verb ' must' in 'All hands of men and women of goodwill must be on deck' suggests a sense of compulsion as opposed to 'should' which suggests obligation. Simply put, the writer is not offering the audience any other option but to do what he advocates so that there can be rejuvenation in the country. Obasanjo emphasises collaboration with the repetitive use of verb 'need' in 'Nigeria needs all hands ...' and 'We need all hands.'. In a bid to persuade his audience, Obasanjo strategically engages (van Dijk 2016) sociocognitive component of 'activities' which deals with what we 'do' and must do in these structures.
Conclusion
This study has investigated how Olusegun Obasanjo in his press statement to President Muhammadu Buhari challenges the power of incumbency in the build-up to the 2019 presidential elections in Nigeria. From the analysis and discussion, we have been able to tease out three ideological positions which the speaker shares with the audience to influence their thoughts and actions. It is pertinent to note, however, that the ideologies analysed in the text even when they could be shared by a class or a group may be rejected or resisted by some audiences depending on their political leanings in
line with van Dijk's (2006b) position that ideologies may be acquired, confirmed and changed through discourse. In politics, people sacrifice logic for sentiments. Winter (2015) argues that political behaviours are governed more by emotions and less by rationality. No one is capable of maintaining all aspects of their thoughts logically without injecting sentiments, especially when there is an attempt to convince someone or a group of persons. Thus, the ideologies in the text may after all have been commodified for political gains in the struggle for power. Power struggle in politics is not just about contestation for space, post or corridor of power, but also about struggling for people's mind. Consequently, counter-discourses could be produced in the form of press statements from the Presidency, challenging the ideologies expressed by the text producer. Also, there could be myriads of counter-discourses produced on diverse online media forums by individuals, political groups and even sponsored media aides to support the supposed object of attack in the press statement.
With respect to the text producer's use of stylistic markers to express ideologies in the text, we find in the analysis and discussion that the ideologies are threaded through the manipulation of certain stylistic devices drawn from Lesley Jeffries' critical stylistics. In relation to the applicability of the tenets of Lesley Jeffries' critical stylistics, the study reveals that the text producer favours the analytical tools of, naming and describing, presenting others' speeches and thoughts, exemplifying and enumerating, equating and contrasting, implying and assuming, negation, prioritising, hypothesising, and representing action events and states to express and perpetuate ideologies. The appropriation of these stylistic tools in the press statement essentially justify Jeffries' (2010) view on how texts can use the resources of language to present a particular view of the world. The view of the world presented largely in the analysed text is that which encapsulates the imperative of acting right to put the country on a safe democratic course.
In sum, the writer's choice of a press statement to express his reservations about the supposed ineptitude of the Buhari-led administration draws attention to the sub-genre as a site of struggle for power among political gladiators. While we may admit that the press statement has a target audience in the person of the incumbent who was being touted to run for a second term, the text arguably seems to be directed at the populace in order to dissuade them from endorsing the candidature of the incumbent for a second term in office. One interesting perspective to how the speaker shares knowledge with this presumed secondary audience is the way he seems to control the thoughts and actions of the audience by presenting his views in absolute terms. It takes the wary audience to beware of the dangers of a single story. It will be interesting, therefore, to read rejoinders to the press statement to see how alternative facts are produced to counter some of the views expressed by Obasanjo in his press statement. This focus could be the preoccupation of further studies.
The analysis demonstrates how micro linguistic structures in the speech reflect and connect to serious political issues in the country. Given the array of syntactic devices evidenced across the linguistic tools analysed in the text, the study has demonstrated the nature of linguistic systems whereby "...one must consider them simultaneously both as something embodied in an individual and as being played out and observable in the larger social text" (Enfield 2005, 313). This brings to the fore the interdependency relations of micro- and macro- linguistic systems.
References
Alowonle, FasasiKhabyr. 2016. "Resourcefulness of graphology: A stylistic study of three African poems." Marang: Journal of
Language and Literature 27 (1): 39-48. Bayram, Faith. 2010. "Ideology and Political Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Erdogan's Political Speech." Annual Review of Education, Communication and Language Sciences 7: 23-40.
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2011. Politicians and rhetoric: the persuasive power of metaphor. 2nd ed. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chilton, Paul A. 2004. Analysing political discourse: theory and practice. London ; New York: Routledge.
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2006a. "Discourse and Manipulation." Discourse & Society 17 (3): 359-383. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926506060250.
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2006b. "Ideology and discourse analysis." Journal of Political Ideologies 11 (2): 115-140. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310600687908.
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2009. Discourse and Context: A Sociocognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Dijk, Teun A. van. 2016. "Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach." In Methods of critical discourse studies, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 63-74. 3rd edition. London ; Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE.
Emeka-Nwobia, Ngozi U. 2016. "Political Manipulation in Nigerian Presidential Discourse." British Journal of English Linguistics 4 (4): 12-23.
Enfield, Nicholas J. 2005. "Micro- and macro-dimensions in linguistic systems." In Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Conveying Trends for the 21st Century, edited by Sophia Marmaridou, Kiki Nikiforidou, and Eleni Antonopoulou (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 161), 313-325. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. Language in social life series. London ; New York: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman. 2006. Language and Globalisation. London; New York: Routledge, 2006.
Fairclough, Norman. 2009. "A Dialectical-Relational Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis Social Research." In Methods of Critical Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 162-186. London: SAGE.
Foucault, Michel. 1983. The Government of Self and Others. New York: Palgrave Macmillan
Goded Rambaud, Margarita. 2011. Basic Semantics. Madrid: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia.
Gomez-Jimenez, Eva. 2015. "An introduction to graphology: Definition, theoretical background and levels of analysis." Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 51: 71-85.
Halliday, M. A. K., Angus McIntosh, and Peter Strevens. 1964. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. (Longmans' Linguistic Library.) London: Longmans.
Jeffries, Lesley. 2010. Critical stylistics: the power of English. Perspectives on the English language. Basingstoke [England] ; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jeffries, Lesley, and Daniel McIntyre. 2010. Stylistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jeffries, Lesley. 2014. "Critical Stylistics." In The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, edited by Michael Burke (Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies), 408-420. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jones, Jason, and Shan Wareing. 1999. "Language and Politics." In Language, Society and Power: An Introduction, edited by Linda Thomas and Shan Wareing, 31-47. London; New York: Routledge.
Kulo, Lena. 2009. Linguistic features in political speeches: how language can be used to impose certain moral or ethical values on people (bachelor thesis, Lulea University of Technology), http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-55589.
McRae, John, and Urszula Clark. 2004. "Stylistics." In The handbook of applied linguistics, edited by Alan Davies, and Catherine Elder, 327-345. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470757000.ch13.
Parker, Ian. 1992. Discourse dynamics: critical analysis for social and individual psychology. London ; New York: Routledge.
Said, Edward Wadie. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University press.
Simon, Adam, and Michael Xenos. 2000. "Media Framing and Effective Public Deliberation." Political Communication 17 (4): 363-376. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584600050178979.
Simpson, Paul. 2004. Stylistics: a resource book for students. Routledge English language introductions. London ; New York: Routledge.
Taiwo, Rotimi Olorunfemi. 2008. "Legitimization and coercion in political discourse: A case study of olusegun obasanjo address to the PDP elders and stakeholders forum." Issues in Political Discourse Analysis 2 (2): 191-205.
Thompson, John B. 1990. Ideology and modern culture: critical social theory in the era of mass communication. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Tsaaior, James Tar. 2009. "Gender Politics and Naming Strategies in Tiv Oral Narratives." In Language, Gender and Politics: A Festschrift for Yisa Kehinde Yusuf, edited by Akin Odebunmi, Arua E. Arua, and Arimi Sailal, 85-101. Lagos: Centre for Black African Arts and Civilisation, Concept Publications.
Winter, Eyal. 2015. "Voting is irrational. Emotions always win." Guardian, May 7, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/07/voting-irrational-emotions-politics-ideology.
Wodak, Ruth. 2002. "Aspect of Critical Discourse Analysis." ZfAL Zeitschriftfür Angewandte Linguistik (ZfAL) 36: 5-31.
Wodak, Ruth, and Veronika Koller, eds. 2008. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Zaller, John. 1992. The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Copyrights
Copyright for this article is retained by the author, with publication rights granted to the journal.
This open access article is distributed under a custom license: freely available to download, save, reproduce, and transmit for noncommercial, scholarly, and educational purposes; to reuse portions or extracts in other works—all with proper attribution to the original author(s), title, and the journal. Commercial use, reproduction or distribution requires additional permissions.
