REPRESENTATION OF PUBLIC OPINIONS ON NIGERIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS IN SELECTED NIGERIAN NEWSPAPERS, 2011-2019

Abstract

Public opinion columns in Nigerian newspapers often provide vital information on sociopolitical issues. Previous studies on political media discourse focused on how public opinions shape pre-election political debates and speeches in Nigeria. However, little attention was paid to how linguistic choices constrain public opinions, especially on Nigerian presidential election results. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate the representation of public opinions on the Nigerian presidential election results in Nigerian newspapers, with a view to determining the public opinion types, their underlying contexts and linguistic forms. Norman Fairclough’s Dialectical-relational model to Critical Discourse Analysis, complemented by M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, served as the framework. The descriptive design was adopted. Public opinions published in February and April of the election years in 2011-2019 were purposively selected because of their robust contents on public opinions on Nigerian presidential election results. Purposive sampling was used to select 300 public opinions, 50 from each of the following newspapers: The Nation (TN), The Guardian (TG), Nigerian Tribune (NT), Vanguard, Leadership and Punch. The data were subjected to critical discourse analysis. Three public opinion types, namely nationalistic, moralistic and diachronic, were identified. Nationalistic revealed strong identification with one’s nation (TN, Punch and TG); moralistic expressed positive and negative dispositions (TN), Vanguard and Leadership; while diachronic presented the acceptance or rejection of the election results (NT, Punch and TG). These public opinion types were found in six contexts: corruption, retention of power, social and political reformation, violence and credible elections. Nationalistic perspectives were situated in the contexts of social reformation. Moralistic opinions manifested in the contexts of corruption and retention of power. Diachronic opinions were used in the context of credible election. Public opinions and context were discoursally marked off by modalities: grammatical (epistemic and deontic) and lexical, which were used to unveil peoples’ attitude towards the election results. Epistemic modals were demonstrated in diachronic and nationalistic perspectives, while deontic modals reflected in nationalistic and moralistic perspectives. Epistemic and deontic modals were prominent in NT, Punch and TG; while lexical modality within the bounds of diachronic, moralistic and nationalistic perspectives were deployed in NT, Vanguard and Leadership Six processes, namely material, mental, relational, verbal, existential and behavioural were deployed. Material process projected all the opinions, while mental process was associated with emotional feelings towards the election results in moralistic and nationalistic opinions. Relational process reflected desperation in the nationalistic and moralistic perspectives. Verbal process was used to reflect moralistic views. Existential processes were used to construct violence in diachronic opinions, while behavioural processes revealed sentiment in moralistic and nationalistic perspectives. Election fairness was captured in Punch, NT and TN; whereas TG, Vanguard and Leadership featured election results as biased. Public opinions on Nigerian presidential election results in 2011-2019, presented through context-driven discoursal and linguistic representations in the selected Nigerian newspapers, capture the sociopolitical realities in the Nigerian political space.