Transitivity and youth violence in #EndSARS discourse

Abstract

, Florence O. Orabueze2 & Violence in Nigeria has reached its peak such that policies that should engage the youths positively are inevitable. This paper aims to establish that Nigerian youths should not be held accountable for #EndSARS protest. Using Halliday and Matthiessen’s Transitivity model, the paper examined the transitivity processes of the major participants in the discourse, and the circumstances implicated. Explication of images appropriated as discursive strategies were accounted for through insights from Kress and van Leeuwen’s Compositional Metafunction in Reading Image Theory. The analysis was done using a descriptive qualitative research design that supports the description of processes attributed to participants, and how social predictors that assign agentive roles to some participants as Actor, or Sayer; and stripe others of their agencies suggest that in the Nigeria’s social context, the #EndSARS protest was inevitable. Such approach was critical in exposing the undercurrents that informed the protest, which previous researches had paid insignificant attention to. From the analysis, several discoveries were recorded, namely: Nigerian government is majorly, a Sayer interested mainly in protecting its pride; the police, and the military are the Actors, while the youths are the Goal in material processes, and behaver in behavioural processes. The paper concludes that the volatility of the youths was a reaction to the processes of the government, and its agencies. The paper, therefore, recommends that government should show practical interest in the plight of the masses by initiating policies that target to engage them constructively so as to prevent future re-occurrence.