OUTLINE OF THE THESIS

30

president, Sir Tafawa Balewa, was killed in a military coup. The second, Alh Shehu Shagari, who came through a political transition programme organized by the military under Obasanjo was ousted through a coup. The third was an interim president installed by the military, Chief Shonekan who was also removed by the military. The fourth president was a retired military head of state, Obasanjo and the fifth was Yar'adua who came through a transition programme organized by Obasanjo and he happens to be the younger brother of Obasanjo's chief of staff, General Shehu Musa Yar'adua, (see appendix 14for Yarádua’s economic interest). Yar'adua died while in his tenure and was succeeded by Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. After the tenure of Jonathan, he was succeeded by Buhari RTD also one time military head of state. One can safely say that the Nigerian political scene has been militarized at nearly all levels. Transition programmes organized by the military go in line with their perception of democracy and what constitutes politics. At a time Gen Babangida is reputed to have turned Nigeria into his vast political laboratory, where, using turncoat intellectuals, he tried all manner of political systems (Amuwo 2002). The effect of this shall be discussed in the explanation stage (5.1.2) in the conclusion, especially the impacts of such action on the whole nation.

31

In chapter two, I talk about discourse as a whole in a top down structure, beginning from the arguments involving the nature of discourse. I emphasize the aspect of interpretation using Members’ Resources (henceforth, MR) and how this is crucial to the formation of ideology. What is assumed or presupposed can be honest and neutral but it can also be ideological. I then discuss key issues in the aspect of CDA, namely: ideology, access, hegemony, history and power. After a thorough discussion of these subjects and how they interact in the naturalization of contentious historical and ideological issues, I then talk about the interdisciplinarity of discourse, i.e., its dependence on social theory. CDA looks to social theory in helping to interpret aspects of social practice and vice versa. I sample theories of importance like Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics which helps in showing the functional nature of textual choices. Its aspects of grammatical transformation like passivization and nominalizations are crucial to my analysis. I also discuss Foucault’s theory of social formation that helps in throwing light on the aspects of construction and all these can be merged with discourse as related to Fairclough’s Textually Oriented Discourse Analysis (TODA).Laclau and Mouffe's articulation theory is also discussed for its importance in classification, naming and subjectivity. From there, I move on to political discourse analysis and elaborate on the works of Wodak and Chilton, Van Dijk and Habermas and their significance in their relation to my own understanding of military coup discourse. The last part of this chapter is a discussion of literature on coup speeches. I talk about three approaches, i.e., Adegbija’s (1995) discourse pragmatic analysis, Akanbi’s (1998) textual properties of coup speeches approach and Abaya’s (2008) pragma- sociolinguistic concept of discourse. The lapses I see in the works relate to the inability of the scholars to relate discourse to the social and ideological aspects. My work will enrich the discussion of such literature in terms of a deep consideration of the social and ideological context. These works, so far on military discourse, again toe the line of non- committal, apolitical disposition towards analysis as issues are only analyzed, and the analysis is an end in itself not a means to a deeper interpretation of society, especially the hegemony of the ruling class and how this endures.

In chapter 3, I discuss the method I use in this research. I, first, discuss the research objectives and methodology of CDA. I then talk about the criticisms made against CDA and tackle some of the criticisms of its method and theoretical orientations. I sample

32

opinions regarding the need for social sciences to move from merely descriptivist and uncommitted positions in social analysis to one with a political attitude and stance in support of the oppressed. I then talk about the methods of Fairclough (2001) and Fairclough and Fairclough (2012) at length. I use both these methods to triangulate results. The component of argumentation or practical reasoning is to see how representation features as a premise in argumentation. From there, I move to discuss my own method, i.e., how I have reworked Fairclough’s method and combined it with interpellation and argumentation to suit my study. Also, at the level of argumentation, I retain Fairclough and Fairclough’s (2012) practical reasoning aspect in terms of the premises, but I also use fallacies in informal logic to bring out the rationally flawed premises in the speeches that are of ideological significance. Afterwards, I talk about aspects of corpus linguistics that I use i.e. concordance lines in sifting data and coming up with helpful semantic and collocational groupings. I talk about the data and how they are acquired and vetted. My analysis focuses on seven coup speeches that are announced, and these are the total texts produced as coup speeches throughout the sojourn of the military and political leadership, i.e., from 1966 to 1993. Other coups are either without coup announcements or they are not announced publically or they are simply purported. There are two additional speeches that are used for comparative purposes. One is the colonial proclamation made by Lugard in 1903 which is compared to the first coup speech in Nigeria to see possible areas of intertextual influences.

The second one is the Abacha counter coup speech used to show the dual face of the military and ideological shifts in relation to different contexts.

Chapter 4 is where I do the data analysis. The chapter is divided into three parts, namely:

representation, argumentation and interpellation. In representation, I analyze how the military represent self and others in such a way as to contrast positive self from negative other. The ideological square is clearly shown here. This division throws light on how the military use rhetoric to advance their arguments and mis/represent society. The transition to argumentation is necessary for it shows how a particular form of mis/representation is used as a reason for action. When you nominalize action, for example, ‘mismanagement’, there is the aspect of the freezing of details. This may be used as reason for action, which is a power take over. In the aspect of argumentation, I restrict myself to discussing only the premises as expounded by Fairclough (2012) without considering the inferences and

33

conclusions for that would be superfluous. When premises are wrong it behooves a reformulation of the argument recursively because if taken as such the inferences and conclusions will most certainly be wrong. At the level of interpellation, I look at how the military go about setting up power and the creation of subjects. Here I focus on the interpersonal aspect of discourse and the distribution of roles. The military set up authority and claim it by using speech acts, especially performatives in annulling existing governments and creating their own. The response of people, being hailed as subjects, captured in their reactions completes the aspect of interpellation. The chain of occurrences of coup speeches intertextually reinforces each other and forms a peculiar genre of power take over with its peculiar orientation, subjects and objects. The Althusserian interpellation theory applies here in showing how the subjects are formed using discourse.

The final chapter takes up the aspect of Fairclough’s explanation stage. Here the concern is the dialectics of discourse. I try to establish a chain running from colonialism to militarism then to civilian administration in terms of influences. The colonial proclamation or seizure of power, I hypothesize, seems to have relevance or influence on coup speeches especially the first coup speech. I compare them to see the similarities and areas of possible influence. The chapter also talks, though marginally, about the effects of military language, especially the disdain for constituted authority and its authoritative nature on the citizens and the political class. The political class appears to adopt the authoritarian nature of military language in their communication or campaigns. In sum, all aspects of ideology are discussed thoroughly using the comprehensive schema provided by Thompson (1984) in his symbolic construction of ideology theory. This synchronizes well with the conclusion as the data is revisited and summed up and placed into areas belonging to ideological construction. The last part is the overall conclusion of the thesis.