Critical Discourse Analysis of Adult Education Policy in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

This study applied critical discourse analysis to examine the ideological construction of adult education policy in Nigeria from 1999 to the present, spanning the Fourth Republic era. Adult education policy texts are not ideologically neutral instruments but encode particular assumptions about the purposes of adult learning, the identity of adult learners, and the relationship between education and socioeconomic development that deserve critical scrutiny. The study employed a critical discourse analysis methodology drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, analysing seventeen major federal and state adult education policy documents, fourteen National Assembly committee deliberation transcripts relating to non-formal education, and twenty-two elite interviews with senior policymakers and education administrators. Analysis revealed three dominant ideological formations shaping Nigerian adult education policy discourse: an economic efficiency frame positioning adult education primarily as a poverty reduction and labour productivity tool, a moral governance frame emphasising literacy as a prerequisite for responsible citizenship, and a marginalised emancipatory frame present in earlier democratic transition documents but progressively displaced in recent policy cycles. The study demonstrates that adult learners are consistently constructed as passive recipients of state-designed literacy interventions rather than as agents of their own educational development, a discursive pattern with profound implications for participatory programme design. Original theoretical contributions include a Nigeria-specific typology of adult education policy ideological frames and a critical policy genealogy tracing discursive shifts across the Fourth Republic period. Recommendations include incorporating critical learner voice into future policy formulation processes. Keywords: critical discourse analysis, adult education policy, Nigeria, ideological frames, Fourth Republic.