Ideological Points of View and Transitivity Selections in a Nigerian Primary Election Memoir

Abstract

Abstract

Since its re-institutionalisation of democracy in 1999, Nigerian political parties have held many primaries. Previous studies on Nigerian primary elections have examined the interface between primaries, intra-party conflicts, general election irregularities and sustenance of democracy. Not many studies have extensively exteriorised the ideological points of view determining the engagements of primary and secondary political actors in primary elections with reference to the narratives of the political actors. Hence, this study did a discourse analysis of a Nigerian election memoir- Love Does not Win Elections- to determine the ideological points of view that the political actors index through selections from the transitivity system. The 127 samples which constituted the sample size were obtained using the purposive random sampling technique and subjected to a qualitative discourse analysis applying an analytical framework derived from van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of CDA, Stuart’s model of point of view and aspects of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The findings indicated that political actors in Nigerian primary elections hold the conflictual, patronage, pecuniary, ethnic, patriarchal, religious and welfarist points of view. Electoral consumerism, clientelism, ethnicism, patriarchy, theological determinism and welfare state variously serve as the ideological backgrounds for the points of view. The points of view are linguistically indexed through material, mental, relational and verbal clauses.  The study concluded that there is the need for a consequential re-orientation of political actors in Nigerian primary elections as their ideological points of view on intra-party elections debar the election of responsive leaders and inhibit the emergence of a genuinely democratic culture.