'Our government has made significant strides’: Legitimation Strategies and Appraisal Choices in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Speech on #Endbadgovernance Protest

Abstract

Past studies on #Endbadgovernance protest in Nigeria have focused on the growing level of youth consciousness of their involvement in governance, perceived effect of the protest on academic staff and media representation of the protest to the neglect of how President Bola Ahmed Tinubu positively self-represent his administration in his speech on #Endbadgovernance protest. Thus, this paper examines legitimation strategies and appraisal choices in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s speech on #Endbadgovernance protest with a view to identifying the strategies and the appraisal resources in the speech.  The paper adopted van Leeuwen’s (2008) legitimation theory and Martin & White’s (2005) appraisal theory which respectively account for evaluation and the linguistic resources. The data for the paper was retrieved online and excerpts were purposively sampled. Findings reveal three legitimation strategies in the speech namely, authorisation, moral evaluation and rationalisation.  Personal and impersonal subcategories of authorisation together with the appraisal resources of engagement and attitude are deployed to legitimate the president’s authority and that of the constitution in restoring peace and invoking the constitutional right to mete out punishment to violators.  Under moral evaluation, abstraction as well as the appraisal system of attitude, is used to project protest as a constitutional right and positively appraise the Tinubu-led government. However, analogy and evaluation, which are subcategories of moral evaluation and the appraisal choice of attitude are deployed to discredit the destructiveness of the protest. For rationalisation, explanation and goal are mainly used to positively appraise, through the system of attitude, the removal of subsidy and the Tinubu-led administration.