Leading through distance: communication accommodation, divergence, and postcolonial authority in Nigerian university leadership discourse

This study extends Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) by examining how Nigerian university leaders, federal officials, and the Academic Staff Union of Universities communicate during the 2019–2024 labour conflict. Analyzing 71 public documents, results show accommodation in this governance context is cyclical, conditional, and shaped by institutional memory, postcolonial bureaucratic distance, and African relational epistemologies. Convergence appears as public alignment yet remains reversible; divergence functions through moral reasoning or legal-rational authority; and maintenance reflects inherited bureaucratic abstraction. We re-theorise CAT showing that accommodation in postcolonial governance is cyclical and audience-directed, historically patterned, explicitly reversible, and grounded in African relational epistemologies.