CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW
2.5 DISCOURSE LITERATURE ON COUP SPEECHES IN NIGERIA
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may be impinging on the claim to understandability, i.e. that what the speaker utters is intelligible within the scope of the exchange. Tropes used in a language may displace meaning as well within the scope of the exchange and deliberately promote ideological interests. All these issues make coup speeches political texts that deserve an analysis of a critical kind.
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society relating to indirectness, social rank and collective essence” (Adegbija 1995, 254).
In general, Adegbija concludes that the tactics in the speeches are, in their coverage of all areas warranting the speech, heavily loaded in their potential to assess the addressees and listeners into making the intended inference. He identifies eight strategies that are important in making coup speeches achieve their aim, namely:
Self-identifying and discourse initiating
Atmosphere sanitizing
Discrediting tactic
Support garnering tact
Authority assumption and exercising tact
Confidence building measure
Survival tactic
Departure/closing tact
While Adegbija’s analysis is seminal in its own rights and while it has also enriched the rather unexplored field of military discourse, it has certain setbacks that my own analysis may either remedy or further enrich in the understanding of military coup discourse. One of Adegbija’s major claims is the fact that some of the strategies he mentions are African in nature
In African countries, perhaps more than most other communities, greetings and the recognition of the addressee in one form or another constitute important strategies for identifying self and getting attention. In many traditional Nigerian communities, for instance, when the town crier has an important message, usually from the village head, he normally begins by recognising the Community as a group after beating the gong to initially attract attention. Martial music, characteristic of the background of coup speeches, functions as the gong and suggests that a coup is in the offing or has already occurred (Adegbija 1995, 257)
This statement has largely glossed over the fact that a coup genre has intertextual influences. Nzegwu’s first coup speech creates a template that others copy from and this template may go back to history and the colonial experience of the military as a conquering
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force, not our cultural repertoire. Lugard’s speech in 1902 also has this element of self- identification and the use of martial music that Adegbija talks of is purely a colonial creation, see (Olatunji 2012, Adeogun 2005, Wangome 1985). As shall be seen in my intertextual analysis, Nzegwu’s coup speech appears to copy a lot not from the traditional African setting which is nebulous here (given that Africa is a disparate entity with multifarious ethnic and cultural groups) but the colonialists themselves. An in-depth intertextual analysis will prove generic influences. The use of martial music started as early as 1892 and “became a full-fledged orchestrated military band in 1922 under a Mr. Lovell, an Englishmen, as its bandmaster” (Adetunji 2012, 429).
Another issue with Adegbija’s paper is in terms of not recognizing the essence of grammatical transformation in the aspect of ideological analysis. He, for instance, relates the use of the passives like the following to the aspect of military humility:
Workers not on essential duties are advised to ...
People are warned ...
The accounts of FEDECO and ... are ...
All airway flights are ...
All ... are hereby dissolved.
The Constitution is suspended.
All radio stations are advised to ...
All sea ports are ...
The National Guard is hereby disbanded.
Decrees ... are also hereby abrogated.
Doubtful loyalty will be penalized.
The former AFRC is now disbanded and replaced by ...
A curfew is hereby imposed on ...
Adegbija argues that if the active and personalised forms have been used instead of the passives, in the above examples given by him, “they would have created an impression of arrogance, pride and brute force” (Adegbija 1995, 265). I think the use of passives there is in respect of the thematization of messages and the emphasis on the point of departure of the message. Themes like decrees, the constitution, curfews, all radio stations etc. are all important topics in a military takeover of power, so foregrounding them is to emphasize their importance. The illocutionary force there and the message sent across have already shown the aspect of ‘brute force’ and the ‘arrogance’ of the military in this case. This is
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typical of ideology i.e. not needing to spell itself out. What better show of arrogance can there be than suspending the constitution? Moreover, the finished or completed nature of the process or verb in constructions like these “becomes more like an adjective, a state….Causality is no longer the main concern, but instead attribution or classification is”
(Hodge and Kress 1993, 27). For example, in a curfew is imposed the term imposed is like a finished state in a modifying role, a given decision which also aids in the formulation of ideology, i.e., an already finished uncontested state of affairs serves hegemonic interest. In addition, restricting movement of all people and vehicles in a curfew which is imposed and foregrounded in the message has already shown this ‘arrogance’ in the aspect of power as there is no regards to people’s human rights. Passives also are used by the military if they want to emphasize or thematize the Affected party through the actions of the enemy.
Our economy has been hopelessly mismanaged Workers are being owed salaries…..
Foregrounding the Affected there, i.e., our economy and workers in that prominent position is strategic for these two things are very important to the lives of Nigerians and would draw their attention. So, the lack of involvement of the experiential and interpersonal values of lexical and grammatical aspects here has, in a way, hampered a more focused analysis of the issues and the values involved. This study on the other hand involves this thorough analysis of representation in grammar and lexis.
Thirdly, in the aspect of the strategy of garnering support, Adegbija (1995) has also overlooked the use of MR in cuing for support. While there are obvious textual ways of seeking for support, especially as clearly shown in his examples, there are ways of garnering support or claim of solidarity through positioning the audience as witnesses, especially when they are constructed as ‘ideal readers’ (Fairclough 2001). Take Dimka’s
‘I bring you good tidings ...’ in the anti-Murtala coup speech, as an example. This statement is made on the backdrop of an assumption cued in the audience’s MR that they share a distaste against Murtala, so any change of the status quo would appear as a happy thing to the people. People may not share this perspective, but they are made, or recruited, to appear as if they do. Personal pronouns like ‘we’ can also be used involving the audience to show a form of constructed solidarity and support between the coup makers and the generality
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of the people which also helps in ideological construction. Take, for example, Abacha’s statement 'intolerable conditions under which we are now living '. In this statement, not only does Abacha put himself in a similar situation to other Nigerians but places them also as sharing the view about ‘intolerable conditions’ in the country. As Wales (1996, 62) expresses it:
The politician-speaker [frequently] uses ‘we’ with the double inference and presumption that he or she is not only speaking on behalf of the party or government, but also on behalf of the audience . . . the rhetorical implication is that the audience or readership must therefore share the government’s views as being the only correct views.
Moreover, Adegbija also believes that there are contradictions in coup speeches. He argues that “the tactful spicing of speech acts that appeal to the addressee with those that threaten (in order to guarantee the survival of the speaker and his group) is the real index of the ambivalence of the military coup speech” (op. cit, 258). Adegbija identifies these ambivalent cases in the tactics used by the military a lot. I think this ambivalence could have been better shown in an argumentation analysis that has a comprehensive schema of analyzing arguments for action. The ambivalences, contradictions and simplifications for rhetorical and persuasive reasons could have all been better analyzed. Also, itemizing the analysis on the basis of representation, subject-formation/interpellation and argumentation could really have teased out all the elements and place them in their perspectives and their functional worth.
2.5.2 Graphological, syntactic and rhetorical analysis
The graphological, syntactic and rhetorical analysis is a model used by Akanbi (1998) to analyse coup speeches. His contributions are analyzed under three broad headings, namely:
graphological features, syntactic features and rhetorical devices. I will highlight some of his major assumptions here and then give my opinions.
Under the graphological devices, he argues that the Nigerian coup speeches use little punctuation. The relative sparseness of punctuation to him can be attributed to the purpose of the speeches i.e., information and persuasion. The urgency of the messages and the
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educational level of the coup planners may be responsible for the dearth of punctuation in their speeches. He also notes that paragraphs are uniquely short in order to make reading easier and more interesting. The military may also not care for aesthetics. Akanbi also identifies four main types of sentences used in the coup speeches: that is, simple, compound, complex and compound-complex. In his view, the sentences are relatively short except on rare occasions where fairly long sentences are used to show the mood of the writer and the seriousness of the theme. There is even a bit of contradiction there especially where sentences are said to be short or simple, yet there is a lack of punctuation. Does it mean that the sentences are run-on sentences? According to Akanbi simple sentences are most commonly used for “self-identification, issuance of threat, commands, giving information and for indicating departure” (Akanbi 1998, 47).
The compound sentence in his view is sparingly used because of the hurriedness in writing the speech. However, the complex sentence in his opinion is commonly used as the subject matter of coups is complex and involves life and death. Akanbi, also, further notes that complex sentences accommodate hidden intentions more than other sentence types. He argues that compound-complex sentences are few because they are long and make reading laborious. Akanbi further maintains that the indicative mood is the most commonly used in the speeches in order to assert, inform, declare etc. The imperative mood is used to ensure an effective grip of the situation on the ground. This is done through blunt use of orders and commands.
In the aspect of cohesion, he maintains that the ideas in the speeches stick and hold together through the use of connectives, pronouns, anaphoric and cataphoric references. He also identifies elements of foregrounding in the coup speeches which he says helps in focusing and emphasizing and that “it brings into prominence certain aspects of texture in a text” in order “to arrest readers attention and interest” (Akanbi 1998, 75). This textual cohesion or local coherence may be very significant indeed in the ways in which texts "position people as subjects and cumulatively shape identities…, and how texts work ideologically”
(Fairclough 1995, 122). It is important to understand that such local coherence or how a text hangs together can be made to appear as universally given for its audience, and so positions such audience to draw it to arrive at a coherent interpretation that is ideologically
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potent. The examples given at the beginning of this chapter on the aspect of cohesion and coherence are relevant here. Local coherence leaves wide issues to be assumed and brought to bear by the audience to make sense of the text. Analysis of presuppositions can help in showing how such ideological coherence is woven.
What is obvious, in other points raised by Akanbi, is that the use of transitivity analysis could have nuanced the study and provided deeper insight into the workings of language in the service of power and in a far reaching context. First, contrary to Akanbi’s viewpoint regarding the length of a sentence as having to do with its ability to mystify reality, the fact remains that it all depends on the choices we make and the intended meanings we wish to convey. In these two sentences we can see how two realities may be represented and how such representation may realize different meanings:
1. Five security guards died in the presidential villa during the coup 2. We killed five security guards in the presidential villa during the coup
Both sentences are not complex in their structure and they are also not in the passive, but they realize different meanings and have different levels of iconicity on the basis of the choices of verbs and structures. The first one uses an intransitive verb where the agent is the victim and the cause of death is rather mystified. The decision to choose either the first sentence or the second may not necessarily be about a simple linguistic choice from options but a choice that may be ideologically determined as both can serve the same reality.
Likewise in these two sentences:
1. I have become the head of state (a relational process)
2. I have seized power to become the head of state (a material process)
The first sentence does not indicate the process leading to the agent becoming the head of state, while the second one is explicit about the process leading to his/her becoming the head of state. Downing and Locke (2006, 145) state that “with dynamic verbs of transition such as become, get, turn, grow, run, the Attribute exists as the result of the process and can be called the resulting Attribute”. In this case, the first sentence treats the process as simply an effectual attribute of the carrier with no further details. The second one, on the other hand, reveals the process with rather clear details.
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Also regarding the use of derivatives as indicating a deft knowledge of language as opined by Akanbi, it can also be a way of freezing clausal processes to save one from an iconic detailing of events or of saying the reality that may not serve the speaker’s interests as in nominalizations. Nominalizations, according to Downing and Locke (2006 162-163),
“distances us from the event, raising the representation of a situation to a higher level of abstraction”. And the moment the event is objectified and depersonalized in this way, it is conceptualized as if it “had temporal persistence, instead of the transience associated with a verb”. “Civilian corruption”, as an example, is a nominalization derived from the verb
“corrupt” which has not detailed the nature, agents, circumstances etc. of the “corruption”.
This process may also involve redefinition, reassessment, reframing and recontextualization of a situation. As rightly put by Fairclough & Fairclough (2014, 93),“Redescribing or reframing reality in rhetorically convenient way is part of a strategy of action” A speech that is lexically dense with nominalizations may be opaque especially as clear details of who, how, where and what may be stinted. The examples I have shown above are to demonstrate, in a nutshell, the potentials of a CDA analysis in going deeper textually and in providing a critical dimension to the analysis.
2.5.3 Speech act analysis
Within the purview of pragmatics, Abaya (2008) works with speech act theory. He adopts the speech act theory as developed by Austin (1962) and revised by Adegbija (1982, 1999).
The study reveals that despite their military background and format, coup announcements have some elements of political language ingrained in them for certain reasons. The result of the study shows that at the pragmatic context level, the speech acts in each coup event depend largely on the context that gives birth to them. The analysis at the social context level reveals that the social relationship between the interlocutors is both symmetric and asymmetric depending on the audience that is being addressed by the coupists. At the linguistic level, he notes that the diction is used to enforce or attenuate illocutionary force.
He further maintains that most of the sentence constructions are in the passive as the coupists do not want to create the impression of arrogance or brute force. Abaya relates the use of the passive here to humility. The study concludes that despite the peculiarities of military coup speeches, they are essentially a subset of political language. While Abaya has done a worthy job in his speech act analysis which has helped in demonstrating their
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deontic powers, there are issues that are lacking in the overall analysis, though to be fair to Abaya they do not fall within the delimitation of his work. The work lacks thorough assessment of the discursive practice, i.e., issues of production and consumption of discourse as it is purely a pragmatic analysis without critical rigour.
Abaya also does not talk about the social and political context and their dialectical impacts on Nigeria. In essence, the social must be engaged both in its contemporary and historical essence thoroughly to understand some linguistic choices and their trip through time. Acts of government inauguration is through the democratic process and the leader is sworn in to office in a solemn process involving the chief Judge of the federation, but in the case of the military, we may look at their acts in terms of forgery of a political process at the initial stage, then concretizing it to an object through repetition and iterability. Toyin (2015) maintains that there are about 14 coups both concrete and alleged in Nigeria. A point is reached where people are not asking about why should the military takeover power, having come past that stage, but asking about who the one taking over is. This shows that the military have been accepted as an alternative political construct. There is even nostalgia about certain regimes (Smith 2007). This also relates to Laclau and Mouffe’s sedimentation of signifier into objectivity due to hegemony and ideology. As argued by Brookes (1995,464) about the transmutation of ideology when challenged “discourses that come to be recognized as racist will ultimately disguise and present their ideologies in new forms, generating old meanings in new disguises which conceal the exercise of power and thus make it more acceptable". People have become naturalized to a power take over by the military and newer areas like the diarchy once proposed by Babangida and also the nature of military leaders like Buhari are the topics that are thought of not the propriety of the military in political power.
Similarly, Abaya, in a discussion of social context, quotes Bach and Harnish’s (1979) Mutual Contextual Beliefs (MCBs) as representing the context of the coup speeches. This is meaning that the coup is launched amid shared values and concerns between the citizenry and the military regarding the disillusionment and disenchantment of the citizenry with the status quo. This positivist analysis by Abaya has probably not considered the fact that the realities that the military draw upon can, as mentioned earlier, substantially, be