The Use of Lamentation as Discursive Construction of Insecurity and Economic Crises in Opposition Manifestoes in Nigeria

Extant studies on political discourse have examined the speeches of presidents, governors, political office holders, etc. Specifically, studies on political manifestoes have concentrated on the analysis of modals, lexical verbs, transitivity, among others. However, the use of lamentation as discursive strategy to construct insecurity and economic crises has gained less scholarly attention. Therefore, this paper examines the use of lamentation as discursive construction of insecurity and economic crises in opposition manifestoes of five presidential candidates in Nigeria’s general election between 2015 and 2023 with a view to identifying the linguistic and ideological strategies deployed in the manifestoes. The study adopted qualitative research design and the data were analysed based on a fusion of M.A.K. Halliday’s ideational metafunction of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Teun A. van Dijk’s triangular model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This is to allow for thorough understanding of linguistic representation expressed in the data analysed as well as their ideological import. Findings of the study reveal that the five opposition party presidential candidates employ lamentations as discursive strategy to expose leadership weaknesses and governance failure of the ruling party, citing poor responses to security threats and economic crises in the country. Activated through transitivity structures embedded in the excerpts, lamentation is lexicalised by emotion driven expressions that evoke mental models of widespread fear, hopelessness, sorrow, joblessness, economic deprivation and social exclusion. The lexical choices ideologically de-legitimise the party in power, frame it as incompetent and naturalise the need to have a more proactive and people-oriented political alternative which each of the opposition parties claims to represent.