Abstract:
The study is set to analyse how the third Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika manipulated language in his
second inaugural address to enhance his political ideologies by using Halliday’s transitivity system as a theoretical
framework. Among the six processes outlined in the framework, the study discovers that material processes highly dominate
the speech, distantly followed by relational, while verbal processes come third. Material clauses suggest that Bingu construes
the world in terms of his past and future happenings by commemorating his first term achievements and setting his
administrative and political principles of his next tenure. His choice of actors suggests that Bingu attributes the achievements
to himself which is a characteristic of undemocratic leadership style. He also uses a majority of relational identifications to
point out to himself and his administration as the main development players. Verbal processes have been used as markers of
transition and topic shift; still, he refers to himself as the main sayer. The speech foregrounds Bingu as a leader with
autocratic and dictatorship leadership ideologies. The study concludes that such leadership characteristics could be possible
reasons that led to his political downfall as his record on good governance, human rights, and political tolerance significantly
got worsened in his second term.
