Political Discourse Analysis:a Systemic Functional Study Of Bingu Wa Mutharika’s Inaugural Address

Over the most recent years, there has been a growing scholarly attention on political discourse analyses. The main argument has been that words of politicians are never neutral, transparent or innocent. They are always loaded with ideologies that reflect and save their interests. This study is set to analyze how the third Malawi president Bingu wa Mutharika manipulates language in the second inaugural address to enhance his political ideologies. Using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework, the analysis specifically focuses on Ideational and Interpersonal metafunctional meanings.In the transitivity structure of every clause identified, it is discovered that Material processes highly dominate the speech distantly followed by Relational, and Verbal come third. His mood choices reveal that by far he opts for declaratives and used imperatives sparsely. Modal auxiliary operators of median scale hugely dominate the address highly favoring will. The analysis of personal pronouns indicates that exclusive pronoun we is by far the majority seconded by I. His choices of the main actor I, main sayer I, and the dominance of the exclusive pronoun we, suggest that Bingu uses the speech to speak about himself. He attributes first term achievements to himself which is a characteristic of undemocratic leadership style. He also uses a majority of relational identification clauses to point out to himself and his administration as the main development players. He projects himself as a hero having defied all odds taking into consideration the rough political atmosphere he operated against while distancing his achievements and plans from the citizens. He commits that he and his administration will shoulder the responsibility of developing Malawi. The speech violates democratic principles by failing to create an inclusive government for the people and by the people. The lexico-grammar foregrounds him as a leader with dictatorship and autocratic leadership ideologies.The study concludes that a number of such autocratic and dictatorship characteristics could be possible reasons that led to Bingu’s political downfall as his record on good governance, human rights, and political tolerance significantly worsened at the peak of his second term. The analysis further shows that Bingu did not perform well on establishing interpersonal relations with the people during his second term. The study demonstrates how leaders’ political discourses disclose a sort of contradictions between their ideologies at early and later stages of their leadership. This study provides sufficient proof that the grammar of speech is not merely a combinational tool of creating correct constructions, but a method of structuring information and transferring ideology.