This article adopts Benoit’s functional theory of campaign discourse and Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive theory in discussing two gubernatorial debate sessions in Nigeria. The selected debate sessions are recovered from YouTube files and transcribed. However, only utterances from candidates in the two major political parties in Nigeria, namely, Action Congress of Nigeria ) and the People’s Democratic Party, are subjected to content analysis. Context models in the aspects of discourse meaning and argumentation are also considered. Findings reveal that first, candidates’ utterances (...) range from acclaims to attacks and defenses. Second, topics help to derive candidates’ ideologies which are further exemplified within the ambience of shared background knowledge. Finally, candidates adopt legal/illegal jargons, explanations, statements of evidence, examples and illustrations to explicitly exemplify their mental dispositions and beliefs. We conclude by stating that candidates’ utterances were found to be relevant within the context of the debates and, by extension, the prevalent socio-political problems in Nigeria. (shrink)

Steve Biko is one of the most important liberation activists of his time. Yet, his theoretical contribution is not well understood or appreciated. This article reconstructs Biko’s political ideas and introduces a new integrated reading and interpretation of his writings, speeches, and recorded interviews. It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal should not only be read as engaging an activist movement or programme but, also, as encompassing an original theoretical framework grounded in a communalist ethos of Biko’s own conceptual development. (...) It argues that Biko’s Black consciousness ideal sought to relate racialised oppression to a historically centred communalist solution framed by two interlocking structural elements—rightful power and free community. The article argues that only by a theoretical and normative consideration of these elements, on Biko’s own conceptual terms, do we get a coherent understanding of Biko’s distinctive view of free postcolonial society. (shrink)

There has been a strong impetus to set the definitional parameters of study in African political philosophy and theory. Many scholars advance the idea of a discipline intended to provide lessons that stem from “original” African moral, ideological, and political traditions. Often, these traditions and their ideas are presented as holding categorical moral substance in so far as they are seen to be specific to a culturally essentialist understanding of “Africa.” In turn, an influential part of the literature estimates the (...) normative value of the intellectual ideas and arguments afforded by a varied historical, socio‐cultural and economic African geography by the degree to which, in being tethered to a seemingly homogenous, “culturally African” influence, these ideas can be opposed to a “Western” equivalent. In this article, I argue that the effects on the discipline of attending to, and being defined by, this cultural essentialism are at best unclear, at worst detrimental. I aim to contribute to the side of those who advocate a universalist perspective to the study of African political philosophy and thought, and who argue for jettisoning an unhelpful dichotomy between “West” and “African,” in favour of a methodological, conceptual and historical specificity that allows the discipline to be truly useful to itself and to others. (shrink)

This article argues that despite its claim to be most concerned with the nature of law in the generality of cases, legal positivism’s almost exclusive focus on Anglo-American law has prevented the tradition from adequately answering the question of law’s authority. This article argues that much positivist analysis either ignores, or takes for granted, the participation of the local population in the historical development of any given society’s law and legal system. This failing means that positivism, and much of analytical (...) jurisprudence, does not provide a truly general, non-circular explanation of authority that accounts as equally for post-colonial legal systems as it does for the Anglo-American systems with which positivism has been most concerned. I argue that the conceptual inadequacies in the explanations of law and legitimate authority offered by those such as H.L.A. Hart and Joseph Raz are most clearly exposed by post-colonial cases, such as Nigeria. (shrink)