‘The land of your fathers lieth in ruins’: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of Nigeria’s 2023 pre- election crises-related internet memes

Abstract

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian Facebook and WhatsApp users during the socio-political crises that engulfed the country ahead of the 2023 general elections. It explores the thematic preoccupation as well as the representation of participants and processes in the memes. Data were subjected to qualitative anaysis, and examined from the perspectives of multimodal and critical discourse analysis. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest cash crunch, fuel scarcity, socio-political unease and other government’s anti-people policies with their attendant effects. The memes are circulated to instantiate a negative representation of the Nigerian government and resist perceived anti-people ideology of the government.