SILENCE AS A PERLOCUTIONARY TOOL: A SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF PRESIDENT BOLA AHMED TINUBU’S NON-RESPONSE TO THE #ENDBADGOVERNANCE PROTESTS

Abstract

In political pragmatics, silence is an "ostensive" act that carries profound communicative weight, often acting as a zero-signifier in high-stakes governance. This study examines the pragmatics of "Executive Silence" using President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s non-response during the initial 72 hours of the August 2024 #EndBadGovernance protests in Nigeria. Drawing on Speech Act Theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969), the study treats this period of silence not as a communicative void, but as an Indirect Speech Act with a specific illocutionary force of "strategic containment." The corpus comprises a chronological timeline of the 2024 protests, official presidential media briefs, and meta-discourse from Nigerian dailies and civil society communiqués. Utilizing Qualitative Discourse Analysis, the study evaluates how the President’s silence functioned as a perlocutionary tool to influence protest momentum. Crucially, the paper evaluates this silence against SDG 16 (Peace and Strong Institutions) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). It argues that while silence can be a tool for administrative brinkmanship, it fundamentally weakens the "Social Contract" partnership between the state and civil society. The analysis suggests that the pragmatics of silence, when overextended, creates an information vacuum that undermines the transparent, multi-stakeholder cooperation essential for sustainable development in a burgeoning democracy.