‘Nigeria is fighting Covid-419’: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of political protest in Nigerian coronavirus-related internet memes

Abstract

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian WhatsApp users during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to exploring the thematic preoccupation, ideology, and the representation of participants and processes in the memes. The data, which were subjected to qualitative analysis, are examined from a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest corruption, perceived government deceit, insecurity, hunger, and inadequate health facilities and other social amenities. These are done in order to project and resist an anti-welfarist ideology and emphasise the negative representation of the government.

Keywords

Covid-19 internet memes multimodality political protest representation

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adams

(2020) COVID-19’s fierce subversion of our supposed separateness: Cultivating life with and for all others. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 60(5): 690–701.

Adegoju

Oyebode

(2015) Humour as discursive practice in Nigeria’s 2015 presidential election online campaign discourse. Discourse Studies 17(6): 643–662.

Ameh

(2017) Aso Rock clinic: Reps probe utilisation of N10.98bn budget. The Punch. Available at: https://punchng.com/aso-rock-clinic-reps-probe-utilisation-of-n10-98bn-budget/ (accessed 15 May 2020).

Barthes

(1977) Image, Music and Text. London: Fontana Press.

Bosch

Admire

Ncube

(2020) Facebook and politics in Africa: Zimbabwe and Kenya. Media, Culture & Society 42(3): 349–364.

Bouko

de Wilde

Decock

, et al. (2018) Reactions to Brexit in images: A multimodal content analysis of shared visual content on Flickr. Visual Communication. Epub ahead of print 12 June 2018. DOI 10.1177/1470357218780530.

Caldas-Coulthard

van Leeuwen

(2003) Critical social semiotics: Introduction. Social Semiotics 13(1): 3–4.

Chiluwa

(2018) A nation divided against itself: Biafra and the conflicting online protest discourses. Discourse & Communication 12(4): 357–381.

Chimuanya

Ajiboye

(2016) Socio-semiotics of humour in Ebola awareness discourse on facebook. In: Taiwo

Odebunmi

Adetunji

(eds) Analyzing Language and Humor in Online Communication. Hershey: IGI Global, pp.252–273.

10.

Chong

(2015) Political protest and civil disobedience. In: Wright

(ed) International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.421–426.

11.

Dike

(2014) Leadership and the Nigerian economy. SAGE Open 4(1): 1–10.

12.

Ewang

(2020) Nigerian security forces to enforce social distancing: Law enforcement response to COVID-19 should respect human rights. Human Rights Watch. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/26/nigerian-security-forces-enforce-social-distancing (accessed 19 May, 2020).

13.

Falola

(2001) Culture and Customs of Nigeria. Westport: Greenwood Press.

14.

Fisher

(2020) Coronavirus exposes core flaws, and few strengths, in China’s governance. New York Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/asia/coronavirus-crisis-china-response.html (accessed 15 May, 2020).

15.

Habeebullah

(2020) Public distrust in Nigeria, covid-19, and the gap in policy implementation. Tekedia. Available at: https://www.tekedia.com/public-distrust-in-nigeria-covid-19-and-the-gap-in-policy-implementation/ (accessed 15 May 2020).

16.

Hart

(2014) Discourse, Grammar and Ideology: Functional and Cognitive Perspectives. Bloomsbury Academic, USA

17.

Herper

(2020) The coronavirus exposes our health care system’s weaknesses. We can be stronger. STAT. Available at: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/02/the-coronavirus-exposes-our-health-care-systems-weaknesses-we-can-be-stronger/ (accessed 15 May 2020).

18.

Huntington

(2016) Pepper spray cop and the American dream: Using synecdoche and metaphor to unlock internet memes’ visual political rhetoric. Communication Studies 67(1): 77–93.

19.

Kemp

(2020) Digital 2020: Nigeria. Datareportal. Available at: https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-nigeria (accessed 05 August 2020).

20.

Kostelka

Rovny

(2019) It’s not the left: Ideology and protest participation in old and new democracies. Comparative Political Studies 52(11): 1677–1712.

21.

Kress

van Leeuwen

(2001) Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.

22.

Kress

van Leeuwen

(2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York: Routledge.

23.

Milner

(2012) The world made meme: Discourse and identity in participatory media. PhD dissertation, University of Kansas. Available at: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/bitstream/handle/1808/10256/Milner_ku_0099D_12255_DATA_1.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 03 April 2020).

24.

Moody-Ramirez

Church

(2019) Analysis of Facebook meme groups used during the 2016 US presidential election. Social Media + Society. Epub ahead of print 11 January 2019. DOI: 10.1177/2056305118808799.

25.

National Bureau of Statistics (2020) 2019 Poverty and inequality in Nigeria: Executive summary. Available at: https://nigerianstat.gov.ng/elibrary?queries[search]=poverty. (accessed 15 May, 2020).

26.

Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (2020) Updates on Covid-19. Nigerian Centre for Disease Control. Available at: https://covid19.ncdc.gov.ng/ (accessed 15 May 2020).

27.

Nwaubani

(2020) Coronavirus: Why some Nigerians are gloating about Covid-19. British Broadcasting Corporation. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-52372737 (accessed 15 May 2020).

28.

Obiakor

Adeniran

(2020) Covid-19: Impending situation threatens to deepen Nigeria’s education crisis. Centre for the Study of the Economies of Africa. Available at: http://cseaafrica.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/COVID19-Impending-Situation-Threatens-to-Deepen-Nigeria%E2%80%99s-Education-Crisis-2.pdf (accessed 19 May, 2020).

29.

Oleribe

Udofia

Oladipo

, et al. (2018) Healthcare workers’ industrial action in Nigeria: A cross-sectional survey of Nigerian physicians. Human Resources for Health 16: 1–10. DOI: 10.1186/s12960-018-0322-8.

30.

Omigbodun

(2020) Preventing COVID-19 transmission in Nigerian urban slums. Business Day. Available at: https://businessday.ng/opinion/article/preventing-covid-19-transmission-in-nigerian-urban-slums/ (accessed 19 May 2020).

31.

Onwujekwe

Orjiakor

Agwu

(2020) Coronavirus: Corruption in health care could get in the way of Nigeria’s response. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-corruption-in-health-care-could-get-in-the-way-of-nigerias-response-136913 (accessed 15 May 2020).

32.

Oyebode

Adegoju

(2017) Appraisal resources in select WhatsApp political broadcast messages in the 2015 Presidential election campaign in Nigeria. Africology: Journal of Pan-African Studies 10(10): 29–47.

33.

Piata

(2016) When metaphor becomes a joke: Metaphor journeys from political ads to internet memes. Journal of Pragmatics 106: 39–56.

34.

Qiu

Chen

Shi

(2020) Impacts of social and economic factors on the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China. MedRxiv preprint. DOI: 10.1101/2020.03.13.20035238.

35.

Ross

Rivers

(2017) Digital cultures of political participation: Internet memes and the discursive delegitimization of the 2016 U.S Presidential candidates. Discourse, Context & Media 16: 1–11.

36.

Ruijgrok

(2017) From the web to the streets: Internet and protests under authoritarian regimes. Democratization 24(3): 498–520.

37.

Shifman

(2014) The cultural logic of photo-based meme genres. Journal of Visual Culture 13(3): 340–358.

38.

Smith-Bingham

Hariharan

(2020) This is the impact of the coronavirus on business. World Economic Forum. Available at: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/why-is-coronavirus-a-global-business-risk/ (accessed 15 May 2020).

39.

Soh

(2020) Digital protest in Singapore: The pragmatics of political internet memes. Media, Culture & Society. Epub ahead of print 27 February 2020. DOI: 10.1177/0163443720904603.

40.

Van Dijk

(1993) Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 2: 249–283

41.

Van Dijk

(2001) Critical discourse analysis. In: Schiffrin

Tannen

Hamilton

(eds) Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.352–371.

42.

Van Dijk

(2002) Political discourse and political cognition. In: Chilton

Schäffner

(eds) Politics as Text and Talk: Analytical Approaches to Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.204–236.

43.

Van Dijk

(2006a) Introduction: Discourse, interaction and cognition. Discourse Studies 8(1): 5–7.

44.

Van Dijk

(2006b) Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Studies 8(1): 159–177.

45.

Zidjaly

(2017) Memes as reasonably hostile laments: A discourse analysis of political dissent in Oman. Discourse and Society 28(6): 573–594.