Love for country and patriotism

The action of the coup makers in the speech is all constructed in the shadow of patriotism and love for country. They labour to show that they have a concern about the dereliction of the opponent. Nzegwu is concerned with the corruption and divisive nature of the political class. Abacha and his team are concerned with the corruption and retrogression of the nation and they are ready to lay their lives for the nation. Dimka detects Murtala’s deficiency. Orkah is trying to 'lay a strong egalitarian foundation for the real democratic take off of the Nigerian state…' In all these cases, there is a ‘patriotic’ concern with issues affecting the nation. Their sense of patriotism also extends to praying and wishing the country and other patriots well:

 Long live the federal republic of Nigeria (Garba)

 Good bless Nigeria (Dogonyaro)

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 Long live the federal republic of Nigeria (Abacha)

 Long live all true patriots of this great country of ours (Orkah)

In Table 10 below there is an intense preoccupation with the concept of nation/country being ours and being loved:

2 social problems which have engulfed

our beloved country, and which have made life

Abacha 1993

3 present circumstances the survival of our beloved country is far above any other Abacha 1993 4 We are no prophets of doom for our beloved country, Nigeria. We, therefore, Dogonyaro

1985 5 corrupt leadership has imposed on our beloved nation for the past four years. Abacha 1983 6 to restore peace and stability to our country and on these foundations,

enthrone

Abacha 1993

7 view of what has been happening in our country in the past few months, the Garba 1975 8 we hope that such nations will

respect

our country's territorial integrity and will avoid

Nzegwu 1966

9 the present composition of our country\s leadership cannot, therefore, Dogonyaro 1985 10 is ready to lay its life for our dear nation but not for the present Abacha 1983

Table 10: Lines with ‘our’ collocating with 'country’ and 'nation'

There is a deliberate rhythm and repetition built into the frequent use of nation/country and the possessive construction ‘our’. The use of this construction here, apart from presupposing the existence of a country loved by its people especially the coup makers, is also a tactic of showing shared cooperation between the potential leaders and the people.

This show of patriotism and love helps in making the citizens believes in the genuineness of the intervention by the military.

4.1.6 Conclusion

In this section, there is an attempt to look at the way the military represent the actions of the toppled government, the actors and also how they see their missions. It is here that most rhetoric is deployed. The out-group members are the toppled governments and their impacts are painted with negative expressive values, while the governments taking over see themselves as behaving and acting appropriately. Hoffer (1980) sees the rousing of

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anger and hatred towards a particular thing or person as a tactic of not only territoriality but that of synthetic kinship. He opines that “to share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance"

(Hoffer 1980, 67). Sharing a common enemy and the construction of the masses to believe in this fact establish a kinship which is not there at all given the multi-cultural nature of Nigeria. Using ‘our’ or ‘we’ including the nation is one strategy of creating this synthetic kinship. Positioning the in-group with positive values and the out-group with negative is a binarist conceptualization that necessarily puts political opponents in direct opposition to the values that the in-group espouse and claim.

The opponents also are divided into two. Opponents under a democracy are condemned more stereotypically using collectives, and with charges against the system as a whole, but with military opponents there is more of personalization and the singling out of a leader or a team and chastising them. The avoidance of a systemic condemnation is strategic for that will be an overall condemnation of the military institution involving the speakers. There is the deployment of nominalization, presupposition, metaphorical constructions, categorical modality and the present tense to make issues appear as factual as possible while at the same time forming meaning associations that build up ideology for both selves and opponents. Nominalizations, for example, are used, especially where there is the need to charge against opponents while stinting on details or to try to show a state of affairs while not needing to make explicit clear representation of facts and figures.

Moreover, it is clear that the rationales given by the coup leaders overlap considerably with those listed by Emenyeonu (1997) from respondents in a study carried out regarding justifications for military intervention. The respondents identified issues mostly in nominalizations that simply re-echo the coup justifications given by the coup makers, a case of intertextual rehashing of coup claims. Emenyeonu (1997, 267) itemizes these issues as: “political disorder”, “unbridled corruption”, “inept leadership”, “neglect of masses’

welfare” and “inability to contain ailing economy” “oppressive rule” and “ethnic domination”. This indicates that the listeners or viewers have adopted the dominant- hegemonic position of the military or they operate inside the dominant code. This position, as explained by Hall (2015, 125-126), occurs “when the viewer takes the connoted meaning

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….full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded”. In other words, the listeners have adopted the preferred interpretation of the message by the speaker.

When issues are constructed like this, it is possibly "an effective way of constraining the contents of discourse and, in the long term, knowledge and beliefs" (Fairclough 2001, 87).

Chilton (2004) call this “qualitative misrepresentation”. And this largely overrides Habermasian (1981) validity claims of both claims of truth and saying the truth. In addition, due to the hegemonic power of access to discourse that the military have, the realities they construct are likely to be the knowledge we may have in the long run of our history, society and political systems. It is as Foucault (1980) rightly puts it that history is written by those who control its outcomes. Realities like these are those that end up forming our truth or our history.

The position or role of the audience is varied too. The citizenry are enlisted as sharers of similar opinion using aspects of presuppositions especially on issues bordering on ideology. This enlistment makes mutual subjectivation. When issues are constructed the aim is not only to construct ideal subjects who agree with the text producer but to reproduce the speaker as a subject in terms of such examples. Take as an example Orkah's charge of homosexuality against Babangida. He attempts there not only to discredit Babangida but to show himself as averse to that form of sexuality that is abhorred by Nigerians. The military create themselves as subjects whenever they charge other subjects negatively. The audience are also witnesses to the realities or facts the military want to foreground or concretize. They are also objects of rhetoric i.e., those to be convinced in terms of the facts represented. When facts are presented with selected premises that easily make an ideological point of view easy to agree with, for example, if there is hunger in the land and yet the civilian government is said to proliferate offices and engage in squander of the nation's wealth, then an audience is positioned as an arbiter in terms of an easy to judge representation. In the next segment on interpellation we will see how the audience position shifts radically from people to be convinced and cajoled to interpellated subjects needing firm control. Also, the representation aspects here talk about the past and its impact while the next segment addresses how the present is dealt with and projections for the future.

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