Pragmatic Affordances of the Theme of National Integration in Political Memoirs of Olusegun Obasanjo, Nasir El-Rufai and Goodluck Jonathan

Abstract

Scholarly interventions have largely neglected how political actors’ actions reveal contextual properties of the events related to national integration reported in the memoirs written by Nigerian political leaders. As a response to this lacuna, this paper explores the themes, contexts and pragmatic force of the question of national integration in three purposively selected political actors’ memoirs in Nigeria – Olusegun Obasanjo’s My Watch, Nasir El-Rufia’s The Accidental Public Servant and Goodluck Jonathan’s My Transition Hours. The paper identifies four themes (national and strategic representation, national unification and national interest, electoral fairness, and broad-mindedness) which are wrapped within three broad contexts (cognitive, social and political) and which assign illocutionary force to the writers’ construction of national integration at different levels of interactivity and governance. The paper concludes that the selected political memoirs chronicle Nigerian leaders’ dispositions to the country’s fragile democratic texture and produce pragmatically-driven models of national integration and effective governance.