“Look at Lagosians and Say I Am Going to Be in Charge”: Ideologies in the 2019 Lagos State (Nigeria) Gubernatorial Debate

Abstract Man, in the generic sense, is a political being whose entire life is permeated by politics. Because language plays a critical role in politics, the study was aimed at examining language as an instrument of persuasion and/or appeal in the 2019 gubernatorial debate in Lagos State. It was born out of the desire to unravel the linguistic strategies utilised by politicians to curry the electorate’s votes. Van Dijk’s (1997) socio-cognitive model of critical discourse analysis ( CDA ) was blended with Culpeper’s (2013) impoliteness theory to analyse the thirty-two (32) texts which were purposively sampled from the responses of the contestants. The theories were merged to establish how authors represent one another while communicating their plans. The analysis of the data revealed that the US / THEM dichotomy of the ideological square was employed by all the candidates. Findings revealed that politicians often raise very germane socio-economic issues in the polity in their presentations in a way that displays solidarity with the citizens, all in a bid to curry their votes. While lexicalisation is also another strategy employed to foreground issues to their own advantage, linguistic impoliteness (e.g., bald on record, name-calling, negative impoliteness, etc.) is deployed by politicians to whittle down opponents’ influence in order to increase theirs. The study concludes that the explication of the discursive, rhetorical, and linguistic strategies deployed by politicians helps citizens become more discerning listeners who make political choices based on convictions and not on rhetoric.