In just about a few days from now, the inauguration of President-elect Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu would take place. It would take place against the backdrop of litigation. Part of the grouses include the interpretation of the 25% requirement which a presidential candidate must meet to be elected as president. Currently, there is a back and forth on the interpretation of that requirement, together with the fact that the conditions seem to indicate that a candidate is required to win 25% of the votes in a bunch of states AND Abuja. The back and forth, in my estimation, is in the definition of the word AND. While those on the one divide say that the word AND includes Abuja, the others insist that it does not.

Part of the dilemma that this scenario has generated and presented to us all is the fact that the persons involved in the back and forth are mostly lawyers. Depending on the aisle they belong, they have very successfully given their various versions of what AND means and how it should apply. Their dictionary, the Black’s Law Dictionary does not have an entry for the word AND in contention. When you listen to the lawyers adumbrate and puff and hump, all you mostly hear them say is that the word AND is a conjunction, and depending on the side they represent, they go right ahead to tell you why their own definition of AND is the correct and the applicable one.

But the question is this: if the Black’s Law Dictionary does not have an entry for the word AND, upon what linguistic platform do these lawyers base their definitions? We may hazard a response concerning the erroneous linguistic platform upon which the lawyers on both sides of the aisle base their summations of the use of the word AND. Most of them base their knowledge of the definition of AND on the basis of logic formulated at the peripatetic epochs of Plato and Aristotle known as traditional grammar. If you calculate the epochs of Plato and Aristotle (384-322BC), you will find out that that epoch spans hundreds and hundreds of years. Throughout that time and up till now, English in our statute books is modelled on an already dead language, Latin. But today, however, most of those nuances related to the Latinate or Aristotelean grammar have all gone under, have been modernized and many have been discarded. For instance, around the 19th century, Michael Halliday came up with the notion of ‘Systemic Functional Grammar’ which set the framework for the modernization of linguistic analysis of grammar. Rather than rely on the ‘parts of speech’ of the old school, this new grammar was built on the Hallidayan tripods of phonology, semantics and lexico-grammar (syntax, morphology and lexis).

Then in 1957, Noam Chomsky, a statistician and linguist, published Syntactic structures. With this treatise, two things happened: English shifted from value judgement to science; and Chomsky’s model – Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), had a Surface and Deep Structure. It overhauled most of the English that our laws are written in. While the other paradigm – traditional grammar – appeared prescriptive, TGG had a descriptive outlook. With TGG, the ‘parts of speech’ – nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, interjections, conjunctions, determiners and articles – together with some of their definitions became somewhat irrelevant. They were eventually sort of replaced with such items as word order, punctuation, tense and aspect, determiners and connectors.

Chomsky’s TGG, therefore, is the most up-to-date template. This template consisting of phrase structure, transformational structure and morphophonemics has very strict rules. What is, however, very disturbing is that 99% of all the laws in Nigeria, including the Constitution, are written on the Aristotelian template. Nearly all lawyers, economists, journalists in Nigeria still apply the old templates. Most of the interpretations of the law in Nigeria have no deep structure, and are based on antediluvian models of the English language. For instance, the Transformational Structure rule puts forward the following rules T-and (to take care of how to use AND), T-q (to take care of how to use interrogative statements), T-af (to take care of how to use the verbs), T-p (to take care of active to passive sentences), and T-neg (to know how to apply negation). Are most judgements and interpretations often made with a recourse to this ‘new’ model?

Therefore, if anyone were to apply the T-and TGG rule to Section 134 of the Nigerian Constitution (as amended), the interpretation of that section would be radically different from the conjunctive definition that most lawyers ascribe to that word. Apart from the more than eight literal meanings which the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English dictionary confers on AND, that word has a deep structure that seems to suggest that we are getting our bearings all wrong, especially with the interpretation of Section 134 of the Nigerian Constitution. I would recommend to the people going to make decisions on what Section 134 of the Nigerian Constitution infers to apply the new TGG Rules. In the new system, AND is not ‘just’ a conjunction. It is supposed to produce a ‘third sentence’. It is a device with which to juxtapose data, information, et cetera. A meticulous rendition of the T-and rule of Transformational Generative Grammar will be found in Tomori (1970), with reasonable background in L. A. Boadi, D. W. Grieve, B. Nwankwo (1968).

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*Etemiku is editor-in-chief/publisher of WADONOR, cultural voice of Nigeria.