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Nuhu Ribadu, the
presidential candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), was
reported last week by NEXT to have said: “They have damaged my
candidacy”. He was, among other things, speaking from the pit of his
despair as he imagined that, given his handling of the coalition talks,
some of his followers could have started feeling that he was not the
messiah they had been expecting. Mr Ribadu’s candidacy and indeed his
political career have been dented. But does Mr Ribadu’s expression of
despair suggest that he is looking for repair through a helpful
discourse strategy?

In his rhetoric of
blame, Mr Ribadu does things with pronouns, holding others responsible
for the perceived damage, probably hoping that he could, in the process,
begin to repair the perceived damage. His use of the third person
pronoun “they” in his statement quoted by NEXT suggests avoiding being
specific on those responsible for this damage. Does that translate to
being very clever and cautious? At first consideration, yes, but that
manner of blaming could also backfire.

The pronoun “they”
is exophoric and vague in Ribadu’s assertion cited above: it points
outside the text of his proclamation, unlike its endophoric use which
points to a specific antecedent in the same or preceding statement.
Grammarians tell us that pronouns are deictic elements (and deixis are
those linguistic elements that point to aspects of situation – entities,
time setting, and space – in a discourse). Discourse analysts also take
the significance of pronouns further and draw our attention to the fact
that people use these elements in their encoding of power, negotiations
of solidarity, as well as practices of exclusion and assimilation. The
bad news is that segments of the public that are addressed may not be
aware of the politics that political public speakers sometimes play with
pronouns. Who says that the linguistic side of political education is
not what a politician could be uncomfortable with, given the fact that
it exposes rather than conceals?

The plural third
person pronoun ‘they’ not only suggests that the destroyers of Ribadu’s
candidacy are legion, but also implies a Them-versus-Us imagination
associated with Homo hostilis, the enemy-making mammal. The Homo
hostilis does not take blame or responsibility for the consequences of
its actions. No; it is the bad guys (who are on the other side) that are
responsible for the misfortune. The Homo hostilis is a saint and, in
Ribadu’s travails, has no hand in the damaging of his own political
ambition. So, we are invited to sympathise with this victim who is a
good guy. If we don’t, we become bad guys automatically, and join in the
damaging job.

Of course, in some
cultural contexts in Nigeria, individuals could sometimes reinvent the
pronoun ‘they’ as a device for suggesting politeness in discourse when
the referent is a singular individual that possesses a higher social
status, something similar to the French use of “vous” in encoding
respect for a singular addressee. The pronoun thus might be used as a
way of avoiding being specific in making reference. In other words, one
simply attributes the action or experience to a vague ‘they’ when one is
afraid or cannot defend an attribution to a specific agency.

I am inclined to
look beyond Ribadu’s rhetoric of blame, which the proclamation “They
have damaged my candidacy” entails, to identify him as the one to be
blamed for allowing himself to be outsmarted by lobbyists of the
coalition arrangement. Someone like him who wishes to rule Nigeria
should know that he is entering into an arena where motives do not have
to be placed like cards on the negotiation table. It would be an
exhibition of naivety for Ribadu to be in the midst of political wolves
and be talking of “selflessness” and “truth”. Those words, even if they
are still in the dictionary of modern politics, are only used in this
“new” context in which Ribadu is featuring in totally different senses.
Our presidential candidate needs to know that when his fellow Nigerian
politicians say “come”, he should prepare to take to his heels! If he is
telling us that “they” have damaged his political ambition, then he is
confessing that he is simply immature and needs to take some lessons
from veterans. Ribadu needs to put idealism aside and become a better
fox if he wants to rule Nigeria.

Indeed, by putting the blame on others, he continues the damage to
both his ethos (character) and to his ability to manage how he cognises
and speaks about relationships in political transactions. Nigeria’s
journey to genuine democracy is implicitly a school where Nigerian
politicians can learn how to speak and act in the presence of others,
and about others. It invites them to grow in and with the process.