A Comparative Appraisal of Selected Campaign Speeches of Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan in the 2015 Presidential Election in Nigeria

Abstract

President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB) and former President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (GEJ) are both known in Nigerian politics and for their participation in the 2015 presidential election in Nigeria. Both are incumbent and immediate past Presidents of Nigeria respectively. They are both socially and politically relevant to the socio-political development of Africa’s most populous country, a fact that accounted for this analysis of their speeches. This paper adopts the appraisal theory (AT) of Martin and White (2005) to explicate the selected speeches of PMB and GEJ with the view to accounting for their stances and for their reasons for taking such stances. Four political speeches were sampled, and two (one from each speaker) were selected and analysed. The data were downloaded from the website of two national dailies in Nigeria (The Daily Post of October 15, 2014, and The Nation of November 11, 2014). Both speakers addressed issues that focus on political, economic, and social matters. They deployed appraisal resources of engagement evaluation and denial to achieve their respective communicative intentions. Buhari engaged appraisal resources of concur, proclaim, distance, and hearsay while Jonathan deployed capacity, disclaim and denial to engage their potential readers. They both used adjectives to describe issues and verbs to refer to issues either in the past or present. This paper recommends that politicians should make their campaign speeches relevant to the context of the future election to engage with their potential readers and listeners.