Aristotelian Appeals for (De)legitimation: A Re-examination of Buhari-Atiku Clash on X during the 2019 Presidential Election Campaigns in Nigeria
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60787/jolan.vol29no1.460Keywords:
Aristotelian Appeals, Election Campaign Rhetoric, (De)legitimation, Nigeria’s 2019 Election, Muhammadu Buhari, Atiku Abubakar, (formerly Twitter)Abstract
Although Nigerian political rhetoric is well-studied, previous research appears to have overlooked how leaders use the Aristotelian appeals of ethos, logos, and pathos to legitimise or delegitimise ideas, policies and actions. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate how President Muhammadu Buhari and his challenger, Atiku Abubakar, utilised these appeals to construct (de)legitimation in their campaign tweets during the 2019 elections in Nigeria. Therefore, while drawing on the classical theory of Rhetoric and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study applied Van Leeuwen’s framework of Legitimation in Discourse and Communication. The data analysed comprised a total of 200 tweets collected from the official X handles of the two contenders published during the 2019 campaigns – October, 2018 to February, 2019. The results indicate, first, that while Buhari’s rhetoric relies on projecting ethos, Atiku’s emphasises on creating pathos. Secondly, while Buhari exploits his ethos to legitimate himself and his decisions/policies through authorisation and rationalisation, Atiku manipulates pathos to delegitimate Buhari and his decisions/policies through moral evaluation. Ultimately, the study concludes that rhetorical appeals critically shape legitimation and delegitimation in Nigerian political rhetoric. It also recommends that future research adopt a multimodal approach to explore how these appeals are created through audiovisual elements in (de)legitimising political agendas.
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