A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF SELECTED CRISIS-MANAGEMENT SPEECHES BY PRESIDENT TINUBU

Abstract

Political leaders speaking under crisis conditions must simultaneously console an anxious public,
assert command over unpredictable events, and justify the decisions they have taken. This paper
adopts the Aristotelian triad as its central analytical framework, in analysing two exigent
addresses delivered by Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu: the July 2023 national broadcast
explaining the removal of the fuel subsidy, and the August 2024 address responding to the
nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests. The study examines how the President, across the
two texts, balances empathy, authority and logic, using a qualitative, content analysis of
seventeen (17) purposively selected excerpts. The study finds that Tinubu’s crisis rhetoric is
anchored primarily on ethos and logos constitutional authority and cited economic statistics with
pathos deployed briefly at the opening of an address before authority and justification take
over. This pattern departs from the pathos-first sequencing that crisis-communication
scholarship associates with effective acknowledgement of public suffering, a divergence that
helps explain why the #EndBadGovernance protests continued despite the President’s appeal.