Discursive Construction of (De) legitimization in Nigeria Politics: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Omoyele Sowore’s Manifesto in the 2019 Presidential Elections

This study is aimed at investigating how the use of transitivity structures in the manifesto of Omoyele Sowore as an opposition presidential candidate in 2019 election legitimizes his positions on widespread insecurity in Nigeria and delegitimizes the ruling party on the same problem. The study adopts qualitative research design, and anchors its analysis on integration of Halliday’s ideational metafunction of Systemic Function Linguistic and van Dijk’s Ideological Square of Critical Discourse Analysis. The findings of the study indicate that the candidate’s de-legitimization of the ruling party on the scourge is syntactically encoded in the transitivity structures such as “Nigeria …an increasingly dangerous place”, “Militancy, kidnappings and terrorism …on the rise”, “Today, the North Eastern part of Nigeria … reduced to a shadow of its former self,” etc. Legitimization of the opposition candidate’s positions is achieved through future—oriented modal verbs in the syntactic structures such as “We will provide better security” and We pledge environmental restoration of the oil –induced pollution, etc. The paper concludes that linguistic construction of social realities is integral to the struggle for ideological dominance, legitimacy and political power in Nigeria political discourse.