PERSPECTIVES AND PRAGMATIC STRATEGIES OF SELECTED CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM CLERICS ON BOKO HARAM IN ONLINE MEDIA REPORTS

Abstract

The Boko Haram (BH) insurgency, a religion-motivated terrorist activity associated with bombings and killings in northern Nigeria, has attracted different perspectives from journalists, social media writers and counter-terrorism analysts in media reports. However, focus has not been given to the perspectives of clerics. Therefore, the perspectives of clerics, stance types and pragmatic strategies were examined, with a view to establishing their pragmatic implications in the BH discourse.

White’s Appraisal Theory, Biber’s Stance Concept and van Dijk’s Ideological Strategies were adopted. The interpretative design was used. Data were sourced from 2011 to 2016, representing the peak of BH activities. Fifty-four reports were collected from four online news sources (Information Nigeria (26), Sahara Reporters (seven), The Punch (two), Vanguard (19)), based on wide representation and presentation of direct utterances of clerics. Four of the most represented clerics (Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor - Pentecostal, Bishop Matthew Kukah – Orthodox, Alhaji MahammadSa'ad Abubakar III andSheik Ahmad Gumi - Sunnis) were purposively selected for their direct utterances and wide representation on BH. Data were subjected to discourse and pragmatic analyses.

Nigerian Christian clerics(NCCs) and Nigerian Muslim clerics (NMCs) expressed four subjective and/or intersubjective perspectives: religious (RP), political (PP), socioeconomic (SeP) and security (SP) through seven engagement devices: concurrence, counter, denial, endorsement, pronouncement, acknowledgement and entertainment. In RP, endorsement deployed by NCCs proclaimed BH as an Islamisation crusade, while pronouncement and counter by NMCs presented BH as a misrepresentation of Islam.In PP, concurrence and entertainment by NCCs and NMCs established the insurgency as government-motivated; endorsement by NCCs foregrounded anti-government declaration viewpoints. Within SeP, pronouncement, acknowledgement and entertainment by NCCs and NMCs established BH as Nigerians’ enemies. Through denial, NCCs presented BH as a product of fundamentalism. The NCCs and NMCs captured BH as terrorists in SP via pronouncement. Epistemic, evidential and affective stances, marked by five transitivity processes: mental, material, verbal, relational and existential characterised the perspectives. Only SeP lacked evidential stance. Nine strategies: authority, exemplification, substantiation, norm expression, comparison, categorisation, vagueness, metaphorisation and religious-self-glorification were connected with different pragmatic functions. In RP, NCCs indicted BH of killing Christians via authority and substantiation,andblamed the northern elite for BH’s actions through metaphorisation and exemplification. Religious-self-glorification and norm expression were used by NMCs to exonerate Islam and the northern elite. In PP, NCCs and NMCs used authority and exemplification to blame the government for deliberate acts, while NCCs indicted BH of insurgency through authority. Within SeP, norm expression was used by NCCs and NMCs to condemn BH and was employed by NMCs to advise the government. Comparison in SeP reinforced NCCs’ view that BH was not poverty-driven; substantiation in SP was used by NCCs and NMCs to indict BH as terrorists; while vagueness by NMCs anonymised BH members.

Nigerian Christian and Muslim clerics jointly perceived the Boko Haram insurgency as anchored to government’s indirect encouragement. While the Muslims also attributed it to socioeconomic conditions, the Christians conceived it as stemming from the religious orientation of Boko Haram.