Presidents and Ideologies: A Transitivity Analysis of Bingu wa Mutharika’s Inaugural Address

Abstract

Abstract:The study is set to analyse how the third Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika manipulated language in his second inaugural address to enhance his political ideologies by using Halliday's transitivity system as a theoretical framework. Among the six processes outlined in the framework, the study discovers that material processes highly dominate the speech, distantly followed by relational, while verbal processes come third. Material clauses suggest that Bingu construes the world in terms of his past and future happenings by commemorating his first term achievements and setting his administrative and political principles of his next tenure. His choice of actors suggests that Bingu attributes the achievements to himself which is a characteristic of undemocratic leadership style. He also uses a majority of relational identifications to point out to himself and his administration as the main development players. Verbal processes have been used as markers of transition and topic shift; still, he refers to himself as the main sayer. The speech foregrounds Bingu as a leader with autocratic and dictatorship leadership ideologies. The study concludes that such leadership characteristics could be possible reasons that led to his political downfall as his record on good governance, human rights, and political tolerance significantly got worsened in his second term.

Major Problems in Analyzing Transitivity: A Case from Indonesia

“…mood and theme and rheme. There were five group papers written by the students on transitivity analyzed based on some theories of transitivity by Halliday (1994), Halliday & Matthiessen (2004, 2014, Gerot & Wignell (1995), and Martin et al (1997). The analysis was focused on the major problems encountered by the students in analyzing the transitivity in the three semantic categories.…”

“…It seems to be quite reasonable since transitivity analysis is so complex involving three main aspects of semantic categories, i.e. participants, processes and circumstances (Halliday, 1994;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004;2014;Gerot & Wignell, 1995;Martin et al, 1997). Then, three aspects of the semantic categories are typically realized by three different groups, i.e.…”

Interpersonal Metafunctions in Bingu wa Mutharika’s Second-Term Political Discourse: A Systemic Functional Grammatical Approach

“…However, unlike Green's study, the present one seeks to explore Mutharika's ideologies of his second term of office. Kondowe (2014a) notes that as soon as Mutharika first came into power in 2004, he set out policies to combat corruption and improve the government's economic policies and investigated several prominent UDF officials who were involved in corruption-related practices and many were arrested. International donors were impressed with him and re-initiated the flow of aid, which had been stopped over claims of Bakili Muluzi's (his predecessor) mismanagement of funds.…”

“…In the first term Mutharika achieved a lot and was commended locally and internationally. He was locally nicknamed chitsulo cha njanji ('an iron rail') to depict his strong character, Ngwazi ('The conqueror'), and Mose wa lero ('The modern Moses') a biblical allusion to imply that he fought and delivered Malawians out of hunger, one of the greatest enemies of the State (Kondowe, 2014a However, despite having successfully served Malawi in his first term, Kondowe (2014a) notes that Mutharika's political image dramatically worsened both locally and internationally at the helm of his second term. His record on good governance, human rights, and political tolerance significantly worsened, and public wrath towards him grew stronger.…”

“…As most modern political discourse studies would reveal e.g. (Donella, 2010;Kondowe, 2014a;Green, 2007), the analysis of presidential discourse is a critical component in discovering and understanding particular ideologies which in turn reflects the political ideologies and realities of their nations. Scholars have realized that Presidents stand for their countries and their voice is taken as the voice of the people (Hinckley, 1990).…”