A Pragmatic Analysis of President Tinubu’s Response to the Address of the CBCN President at the State House


Published in AKSUJEL - September, 2026

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Abstract

This study examines the pragmatic features of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s response to the address of Most Rev. Matthew Man-Oso Ndagoso, President of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Nigeria (CBCN), during the bishops’ visit to the State House, Abuja, on 28 July 2026. The interaction occurred against the background of concerns expressed by the Catholic bishops regarding insecurity, economic hardship, education, democracy, credible elections, religious freedom and the return of mission schools. The study adopts a qualitative pragmatic approach, drawing principally on Speech Act Theory, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, implicature and politeness theory. The analysis demonstrates that President Tinubu’s response performs several communicative functions, including asserting, promising, reassuring, defending, directing and persuading. His use of expressions such as “We don’t have another country but here – this Nigeria,” “We will defeat terrorism,” and “there is prosperity on the horizon” illustrates the deployment of representative, commissive and expressive acts to construct optimism and national solidarity. His response to the bishops’ concerns also reveals strategic use of implicature, particularly in his presentation of the government’s achievements and his attribution of responsibility for some matters to constitutional structures. The study argues that Tinubu’s response constitutes a politically strategic discourse in which pragmatic resources are employed to negotiate disagreement, defend government policies, reassure the audience and maintain a cooperative relationship with religious leaders. The study concludes that presidential responses to institutional criticism are not merely informational but constitute complex acts of political persuasion, face management and ideological positioning.

Keywords: Pragmatics Speech Acts Implicature Political Discourse CBCN Tinubu

Cataloging & Classification: Bi-annually , Vol.7(1) pp. 108-116

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