Obafemi Awolowo as the Personification of a Strong Opposition in Nigeria's First Republic: The Didactic Elements from His Rhetoric

Abstract

This paper examines whether or not there is a statistically significant difference in Awolowo's reactions to the five different issues of the economy, politics, socio-cultural milieu, international relations and education as the opposition leader in Nigeria's first experience at the parliamentary system of government during the first republic. The purpose of the study, in this regard, was to analyse Awolowo's political speeches during the period he served as the opposition and to see the extent to which each of them is given prominence of attention and also whether, taken together, they show Awolowo as a social democrat and prophet. Indeed, this study of Awolowo's experience as opposition leader, from December, 1959 (maiden meeting of the house was on Jan 13, 1960) to January 15, 1966, constitutes one out of seven hypotheses tested by this same researcher, and is therefore within the umbrella of the whole longitudinal study spanning the whole career of Awolowo as a politician from 1951 to 1983. For the whole longitudinal study, 40 political speeches which represent six phases in Awolowo's political career from 1951 to 1983 were selected through the proportional stratified sampling technique for content analysis. Measures of five broad issues (Category A – E), within and across six political situations, were employed to test seven hypotheses through the One-way ANOVA, Newman Keuls' Method of Multiple Comparison and Pearson's Product Moment Correlation. For the purpose of this particular paper, however, 3 of the 40 sampled speeches have been accommodated within this period. Using a logical scale comprising 25 themes, we assess the relative prominence of the five issues (dependent variable) against the background of Awolowo's reactions to the issues (independent variable) through the content analysis method, as originally conceptualized by Harold Laswell, (1948) and developed by Berelson (1952). Findings, from the One-way ANOVA, reveal that there is a statistically significant difference in Awolowo's reactions to the five issues. A further Newman Keuls' analysis, designed to locate where the differences could be found, shows that, whereas Awolowo places a greater emphasis on politics than any of the other four issues, as the opposition leader, he treats the other four issues uniformly. This is against the background of the revelation of the post-mortem comparison of the means of the issues. The research results were presented in 4 tables to show the pattern of Awolowo's rhetoric during this period.