Pragmatic Contradiction, Precarious Citizenship and Structural Resistance: A Comparative Pragma-Linguistic Analysis of the Nigerian and Ghanaian Constitutions

Globally, the credibility of electoral processes is largely predicated on Constitutions promise democratic inclusion while simultaneously creating unequal experiences of citizenship through the language of authority, rights, and governance. The same constitutional expressions that legitimise political power may also generate spaces for contestation and resistance. This article presents a comparative pragma-linguistic analysis of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution (as amended) and Ghana’s 1992 Constitution, examining how constitutional discourse produces tensions between democratic ideals and precarious citizenship. Drawing on Speech Act Theory, Gricean implicature, presupposition theory, and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study analyses constitutional preambles, supremacy clauses, fundamental rights provisions, executive powers, and amendment procedures. It argues that performative claims of popular sovereignty, particularly collective formulations such as “We the People,” may conceal unequal relations of constitutional authorship and participation. The analysis demonstrates that strategic vagueness, reflected in modal expressions and open-ended terms such as “public interest,” creates interpretive flexibility that may expand executive discretion and produce uneven experiences of constitutional protection. However, such linguistic openness does not function solely as a mechanism of domination; it also provides discursive resources for judicial intervention, civic activism, and democratic resistance. The comparison reveals that Nigeria’s military-influenced constitutional origins create tensions between federal power-sharing ideals and centralising practices, while Ghana’s participatory constitutional development strengthens democratic legitimacy but retains possibilities of institutional concentration. The article concludes that constitutional language in postcolonial democracies is fundamentally ambivalent: it can reproduce precarious citizenship while simultaneously enabling the contestation and transformation of political authority.