There is no debate about it that President Bola Tinubu has unleashed so much domestically and he is being fought on all sides. But in the statement quoted below, he has entered a different terrain that must be noted differently from the domestic circumstances.
The president comes unstuck in the quote below in a manner no student of rhetoric will ignore. That is for those who understand rhetoric beyond languaging or what some others would call grandiloquence. Rhetoric goes deeper than that in the politics of meaning.
Anyway, the president’s contention below merits preservation since meaning is not static. Students of traditional linguistics, deconstruction, critical geopolitics and global entanglement will continue to feast on it, not in binary sense of right or wrong but within the changing configuration of national and global elements:
“Nigeria is the candle of hope that will light the way for Africa. And once Africa is illuminated, the world will be a brighter place for all of humanity”
A deconstructivist (with their belief in Derrida’s famous notion that there is nothing outside the text) can write a whole thesis on this quotation. But that is not the point here. The point here is that the president of Nigeria is now a card-carrying member of the current wave of Afro-optimism and all the fears and hopes that accompany that layer of global politics.
Certainly, that is worth taking note of!
