Politics, Governance and Development

Nigeria’s constitution allows legislators to speak Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba, but English remains the language of the National Assembly. This paper reads parliamentary records alongside theories of linguistic justice to ask what a genuinely multilingual legislature would require. It proposes a model of interpreted debate that treats language rights as part of political representation.

Call-in programmes on Nigerian radio give ordinary listeners a rare public platform. This paper develops a theoretical account of these programmes as sites of public reason, drawing on Habermas and on African theories of communal deliberation. It argues that the genre’s conventions, the greeting, the testimony and the presenter’s summing-up, create a distinctive form of reasoned exchange that the idealised public sphere does not capture.