Delegitimising Nonviolent Resistance via Newspaper Headlines: The Case of Sit-at-Home Protests by Indigenous People of Biafra

Abstract

‘Sit-at-home’, an annual protest employed by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) to draw attention to their planned secession agenda and alleged marginalisation, has attracted widespread media attention and triggered continuous ongoing public discussions. The resistance campaigns that paralyse socio-economic activities in the south-eastern region of Nigeria constitutes ideological representations in the media. This paper examines delegitimation of the IPOB’s sit-at-home protests in the Nigerian newspaper headlines to show how discursive constructions of the events contribute to the non-conformists discourse tags of the protesters. Using Van Leeuwen’s Discourse Legitimation Approach, it draws on a dataset of 114 headlines on the civil disobedience protests from four Nigerian national newspapers, published between 2017 and 2019. The findings reveal that the IPOB protesters are generally constructed as non-conformists through four discursive strategies, namely, authorisation, moralisation, metaphorisation and discordancy. The strategies underlie value judgements and evaluations inherent in negative other representations that contribute to discrediting IPOB secessionist group in the Nigerian society.