Discursive construction of Ghana's digital agenda in (vice) presidential discourse: A corpus-assisted study

The electronic age lends itself to a deliberate action towards digitalization and this has led to the surge in discourses of and around digital economies. Scholarly claims of vagueness in African countries’ pursuit of the digital agenda and the political leverage of digitalization discourses by social actors are examined by this research to unveil the discursive constructions of Ghana’s digital agenda and its social actors. Using corpus methods and Discourse-Historical Approach to discourse analysis, the study employs a five-year corpus of speech by Ghana’s vice president as a primary data for the study. The analysis reveals three main ideologically motivated themes: digitalization as beneficial in several aspects of Ghana’s society, manifestations of Ghana’s digital exploits, and principal officers’ ideological stance on digitalization. Digitalization is presented as both a preventive and curative measure to Ghana’s economic challenges. The dominant collocates of ‘digital’ include address, revolution, divide, through, platforms and port. Social actors are positioned as visionary and pro-digitalization, with discursive strategies like anthroponyms, personal pronouns, perspectivization, and evaluative predicates employed to construct a political identity that aligns leadership legitimacy with digital transformation. The findings affirm the ideological motivations behind digitalization in Ghana, supporting claims that policy actors use digital discourse to construct political personas. Contrary to critiques of vagueness in African digital agendas, the study finds Ghana’s digitalization discourse to be coherent, policy-driven, and ideologically transparent. The study concludes that digitalization as a policy and ideology is clearly conceptualized in Ghana’s presidential discourses, and the discourse around digitalization is political.