‘We didn’t arraign a minor’: Disclaimer strategies in the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s rejoinders.

Abstract

Crime-fighting institutions in Nigeria are those institutions constitutionally empowered to combat crimes in their different forms and shades. Extant studies on crime-fighting institutions in Nigeria have focused more on the Nigeria Police, with particular emphasis on police-suspect interactions. However, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) saddled with the responsibility of fighting economic and financial crimes, particularly from the linguistic perspective. This study, therefore, from a linguistic lens, investigates disclaimer strategies in EFCC’s rejoinders, to demonstrate how the Commission deploys linguistic-discursive resources for institutional image repair Data comprised 20 randomly sampled selected press releases (rejoinders) issued between 2019 and 2024, as elicited from the Commission’s website, and other online news or social platforms, including the Nairaland, the Pointblank news, The Vanguard, and Sun news online. With analytical insights from Dijk’s (2004) critical discourse analysis and Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act theory, findings show that refutation and deresponsibilisation, allusion to institutional professionalism, and indirect accusation are discursive disclaimer strategies which EFCC’s rejoinders are replete with. These discursive strategies ride on counterfactuals, lexicalisation, evidentiality, positive self-representation, and negative other-representation for pragmatic effects. Inherent in these discursive resources are the practs of blaming, enjoining, condemning, praising and threatening.