APPRAISAL OF PRESIDENT MUHAMADU BUHARI’S DISCOURSE ON NATIONAL HEALTHCARE REVITALISATION

Abstract

Languages across the globe are characterised with strategies that help their users to bend human thoughts for achievement of conversational goals in different discourse situations. Most times speakers, especially political office holders, capitalise on the contexts of discourse to manipulate their listeners, using a series of the strategies that are embedded in the language of discourse. In the case of President Buhari, the political figure usually has his speeches written before they are delivered to his audiences on different occasions. It is therefore expected that some discursive strategies would have been woven into the speeches. Such strategies need to be explored for the purpose of identifying the contextual, syntactic, cohesive markers and organisational patterns that characterise the President’s speeches. On that basis, this paper carries out appraisal of the President Muhamadu Buhari’s discourse on his commitment to national healthcare revitalisation in order to establish how his speeches serve as an ideological changer through political pronouns, intertextuality and hegemony while foregrounding his priority to the healthcare of Nigerians in the minds of his listeners. The paper finds that the President influences the thoughts of his listeners into recognising his commitment to their welfare and sincerity to his responsibility through his choice of political pronouns. It also establishes that the political figure exploits reference, repetition, connectivity, negation and anaphora through intertextuality to sustain the goal of his discourse. It as well reveals that he perpetuates hegemonic tendencies by accentuating the importance of his physical presence at the context of the discourse. The paper concludes that President Buhari’s choice of discursive strategies further sustains unequal power relation between him and his audience, and promotes wider acceptance of his personality among the audience.