Social Media and Crisis Between the State and Secondary School Teachers in Cameroon: A Discourse Analysis of Telegram Messages and the Government Responses

Abstract

This study explores teachers’ discourses on Telegram during the strike launched by the movement “Enough is enough” or “On a Trop Supporté” in its French version. Secondary school teachers have been subject to the state’s manipulations and procrastinations since 2000. Some of the government announcements bearing expressions such as “On the high instructions from the Head of State”, “we will gradually solve the problems of teachers”, “ teachers are the best paid civil servants in Cameroon” just to postpone what they would have done before. Since then, the state kept feeding them with promises that are hardly fulfilled. As a matter of fact, the state continued to give them empty promises about their salary and special status. The issue resulted in the strike which began on February 21st, 2022 and is still going on. This study aims at investigating the linguistic power of some expressions used by the government in order to keep teachers in their poor working conditions. In addition, it investigates the teachers’ reactions towards the government dishonesty. Fairclough (1992, 1993, and 1995) CDA model helped in the process of data analysis. Data for this study is made up of 150 Telegram messages collected from secondary school teachers nationwide. Analysis unveiled that the government’s messages leaned on the slovenliness of English language to dodge the teachers’ requests.