Abstract

This study examines political debates, interviews, campaign speeches and public statements involving five Nigerian presidential aspirants: Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi. Drawing on Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), it analyses 50 purposively selected speech extracts through five interpretive dimensions associated with emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, social skills, empathy and motivation. The analysis treats these dimensions not as psychological traits that can be directly diagnosed from speech, but as interpretive categories through which audiences may evaluate the interactional work performed by public language. The distribution of extracts across the five categories shows: self-awareness (8), selfregulation (12), social skills (14), empathy (6) and motivation (10) while the illustrative extracts include selfpresentation, personal attacks, claims about opponents, appeals to shared identity and narratives of perseverance. These patterns show how political utterances can invite evaluations of a speaker's composure, relational orientation and capacity to mobilise an audience. The study also identifies a methodological limitation in applying CAT: convergence and divergence require a relevant interactional or social reference point and cannot be inferred simply from whether an utterance is polite or hostile. The paper therefore proposes a cautious, discourse-based account of emotional-intelligence-related meanings in political communication, while recognising that speech analysis alone cannot establish a politician's underlying emotional-intelligence level.