Metaphor and Nation-Building Rhetoric in the Speeches of President Muhammadu Buhari

This study analyses the metaphorical language and nation-building rhetoric in selected public speeches delivered by President Muhammadu Buhari between 2015 and 2022, examining how presidential language constructs national identity, distributes blame, and articulates visions of Nigerian belonging and progress. Presidential rhetoric is a significant site of ideological work in any democracy, and in Nigeria's linguistically and ethnically diverse context, the metaphorical framing of national challenges and aspirations carries particular weight in shaping public perception of governance and social cohesion. The study compiles a corpus of ten major speeches, including inaugural addresses, Democracy Day speeches, and nationally broadcast security addresses, drawn from the State House media unit's official published transcripts. Conceptual metaphor theory provides the primary analytical framework, supplemented by critical discourse analysis. Analysis identifies the dominant metaphorical conceptual systems employed across the corpus, including the nation as a body requiring healing, corruption as a disease, security threats as a fire to be extinguished, and economic recovery as a journey. Findings reveal that Buhari's rhetoric is characterised by a persistently medical-diagnostic metaphor cluster that constructs his presidency as a curative intervention in a nationally diseased body politic, a framing that legitimises authoritative governance while deflecting questions of political process. Regional and religious metaphors are found to be more cautiously deployed than economic ones. The study argues for greater critical literacy attention to presidential metaphor in Nigerian secondary and tertiary English education. Keywords: presidential rhetoric, metaphor, nation-building, Buhari, critical discourse analysis.