Abstract
Articles abound on political
discourses from a metaphoric point of view. This article justifiably focused on
the many over used words by Nigerian present and past presidents. These clichés
are identified as different kinds of politically motivated usages for the
motifs of suppression, servitude and hero-worshipping. From a cognitive
linguistic point of view this paper adopts Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) theory
of metaphor which drives the “understanding and experiencing of one kind of
thing in terms of another”. In other words, the theory provides the ideology of
a target domain A as source domain B. Making sense of a metaphor is done by
mapping salient properties (and where possible: relations between those
properties) from source to target. A few metaphorically embedded expressions
from President Muhammad Buhari of Nigeria were drawn from the 56th
independence speech which were recorded and transcribed for analyses in this
paper. From economic recession to the
unending state of insecurity in the nation as well as the musketeering scourge
of corruption and dependence on importation, the appeal of PMB has been made to
explain poor aqua-culture and rural development, poor state of power and energy
in Nigeria, poor state of federal roads across the nation, poor housing and
infrastructural programmes and on the whole is the unfriendly business
environment in Nigeria, repugnant to foreign investors. We conclude that
different worldviews have been communicated persuasively through metaphorical
expressions tactically employed in this political discourse; the 56th
Independence Day speech of PMB.
Keywords: Cliches, Metaphors, Independence Day speech,
Economy, Security, Transportation
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.024
author/Ene'ojo Joshua Onuche (Ph.D) & Oladimeji Kaseem Olaniyi (Ph.D)
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(2) | June 2026
