Developing an Original Theoretical Framework for Understanding the Role of Communication in Nigerian National Development Ideology

Communication has been constitutive rather than merely instrumental in the construction and contestation of Nigerian national development ideology, yet the systematic theorisation of this relationship drawing on both communication theory and development studies remains an important scholarly gap. This study developed an original theoretical framework for understanding the role of communication in Nigerian national development ideology. A historical-theoretical methodology integrating critical communication theory, development discourse analysis, and postcolonial political economy was employed. The analysis traced the communicative construction of Nigerian development ideology across five historical phases: colonial development communication (1900 to 1960), nationalist development vision communication (1960 to 1970), oil boom developmental state communication (1970 to 1985), structural adjustment communication politics (1985 to 1999), and democratic development communication (1999 to present). Primary textual analysis of 320 key development policy documents, presidential speeches, and official media reports was supplemented by 42 interviews with policy communicators, development journalists, and communication scholars who participated in different phases of development discourse. The resulting original framework, the Nigerian Development Communication Ideological Cycle, proposes that Nigerian development ideology is communicatively reproduced through five interconnected processes: official narrative encoding (construction of authoritative development vision texts), institutional communication deployment (propagation through state media and educational institutions), counter-narrative contestation (civil society and opposition development discourse), international legitimation communication (external audience management of development performance), and popular reinterpretation (grassroots reworking of official development narratives into lived experience meaning). Original contributions include the Developmental Silence Concept, theorising how strategic communicative avoidance of failure acknowledgment shapes Nigerian development discourse cycles.

Keywords: national development ideology, communication and development, Nigeria, theoretical framework, political communication