VISUAL-TEXTUAL STRATEGIES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF POLITICAL ACTORS IN THE NIGERIAN 2019 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN ONLINE CARTOONS

Abstract

During presidential election campaigns in Nigeria, online media platforms deploy cartoons as strategies to project their preferred candidates. Existing linguistic studies on presidential elections focused largely on linguistic strategies, media representation and non-linguistic features, with little attention paid to the implicit way the media represent political candidates using the visual-textual mode. Therefore, this study was designed to examine the depiction of presidential election campaigns in Nigeria in online cartoons in the 2019 election, with a view to determining the representation forms, the cartoon meaning-making techniques, and the socio-contextual issues raised in the sampled cartoons. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Social Semiotic Approach, complemented by M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, served as the framework, while the descriptive design was used. Five online news platforms: Punch, Daily Trust (DT), Vanguard, Nairaland and BusinessDay were purposively selected because of their consistent and relevant political cartoon publications. Cartoons representing two major political actors, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC), were purposively chosen because of preponderance of publications on them and their mega parties status. Forty political cartoons were selected through purposive sampling: Punch (6), Vanguard (5), DT (10), Nairaland (5) and BusinessDay (14). The data were subjected to multimodal analysis. Meanings in the cartoons were evoked using two processes: narrative and conceptual. While narrative process explains the various actions performed by the represented participants in the cartoons and the matching speeches, the conceptual process attributes them to the connective events. Representation takes positive and negative forms. The negative representation of the candidate of the APC, Muhammadu Buhari, foregrounded bad leadership, corruption, poor policies, incompetence, religious and ethnic bigotry, insecurity and wickedness (Punch and BusinessDay). Buhari was symbolically represented as one who shed the blood of innocent people by giving freedom to killer herdsmen in Nigeria while his religious and ethnic bigotry were tacitly embedded to have favoured the Fulani against other ethnic nationalities in the country (Punch, BusinessDay and Vanguard). Negative representation attributed to Atiku Abubakar of PDP tilted towards economic mismanagement and corruption. The images conceptualised him as unstable, corrupt and disobedient (DT and Nairaland). Salience, vector, colour, party emblems, facial expressions, social distance, accomplishments, shots, symbolism and attributives were used as visual cues. The positive representations attempted redeeming the images of both candidates through symbolic repentance gestures (DT, BusinessDay, Punch and Vanguard). The textual cues evoked were affirmations, exclamations, sarcasm, verbalisations, metaphorisation, capitalisation, reference, interrogative statements, ellipsis, exaggeration, repetition, nominal and pronominal choices to complement meanings in the speech process. Affirmations were used for emphasis, capitalization for clarity and exaggerations for image enhancement. Online cartoons during the Nigerian 2019 presidential election campaigns had negativepositive representations, deployed through multimodal means, targeted at influencing the chances of the represented political actors at the polls.