A critical discourse analysis of some selected 2019 Nigerian presidential election campaign advertisements on social media

Abstract

Political campaign advertisements are one of the mediums where the electorates hope to get the right information to help them make a choice before an election. The study explored the lexico-syntactic patterns, discourse strategies and how they were used to create ideologies in the 2019 Presidential campaign advertisements. The study adopts the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Van Dijk called socio-cognitive model and his (2000) model on principles that express ideological stances. Five campaign advertisements were purposively selected for analysis from the following social media platforms: Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and also the following media outlets punch.com, nairaland.com, to mention but a few. The campaign advertisements chosen featured the two major candidates, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) and Muhamadu Buhari of the APC (All Progressives Congress) in the 2019 Presidential elections. The study revealed that the campaign advertisements chosen used discourse markers that emphasized ideologies like; APC is a haven for corrupt Nigerians, Atiku is a thief, Buhari and Atiku do not care about the poor, Buhari is incorruptible, are among other ideologies that the campaign advertisements tried to portray. The study submits that discourse was negative especially in the presentation of the ‘out group’ (the political opponents) and that the ideology of the text creators was a very strong force in all the texts analyzed. Therefore, the electorates need to be more critical in reading these presidential campaign advertisements before forming their opinions and taking actions, in order to deepen our democracy.