Chatham House of Interest and the Discourse of Globalised Political Expressions in Peter Obi’s 2023 Pre-election Speech

Abstract

Chatham House, for the reason of its royalty, institutionalism and independence, has become a global beehive and platform where, especially Nigerian political actors articulate their ambitions and policies and prove the mettle of their deservedness for the nation’s helmsman’s job. Extant political discourse studies have largely examined conventional campaign speech-situations with stint considerations for political expressions offered on the postmodern globalised campaign platforms. This study, therefore, investigated Peter Obi’s Chatham House speech (POCHS) with a view to examining the contextually referenced discursive strategies that project Nigerian presidential candidacy as more of offshore interest in the twenty-first century global politics. Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory was used as the framework in analysing the elemental linguistic and non-linguistic strategies deployed in the electronically sourced POCHS. The data, processed into analysable extract-units, were subjected to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Mr. Peter Obi’s (PO) unusual employment of attitude-demonstrated ‘affect’, ‘appreciation’ and ‘judgement’ was unique in relating his global audience to virtues and attributes that qualify him for the Nigerian topmost position, presenting him as an unconventional politician. Positive and negative appreciation and judgements were used for personal-self-evaluation, corporate-self-evaluation, ‘others-self-evaluation’, and nation-self-evaluation while the bases for appreciation and judgement were personal and party competence, problems, policy gaps and solutions. PO deployed engagement as monogloss and heterrogloss on top of ‘graduation’ with intensifiers and quantifiers as force that projected ‘focus’, ‘emphasis’ and ‘analogies’. Thus, globalised political context influenced PO’s exploitation of the rarely available global platforms (Chatham House) to articulate his political ambition and manifesto. Language is, therefore, revealed as dynamic force for presentation and evaluation of persons, problems, policies and panaceas that are capable of endearing him to the expectation of the audience at Chatham House, pointing to Nigerian presidency as a phenomenon of 21st century’s global interest.