Abstract:
During presidential election campaigns in Nigeria, online media platforms deploy cartoons
as strategies to project their preferred candidates. Existing linguistic studies on presidential
elections focused largely on linguistic strategies, media representation and non-linguistic
features, with little attention paid to the implicit way the media represent political candidates
using the visual-textual mode. Therefore, this study was designed to examine the depiction
of presidential election campaigns in Nigeria in online cartoons in the 2019 election, with a
view to determining the representation forms, the cartoon meaning-making techniques, and
the socio-contextual issues raised in the sampled cartoons.
Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Social Semiotic Approach,
complemented by M. A. K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, served as the
framework, while the descriptive design was used. Five online news platforms: Punch,
Daily Trust (DT), Vanguard, Nairaland and BusinessDay were purposively selected because
of their consistent and relevant political cartoon publications. Cartoons representing two
major political actors, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and
Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC), were purposively chosen
because of preponderance of publications on them and their mega parties status. Forty
political cartoons were selected through purposive sampling: Punch (6), Vanguard (5), DT
(10), Nairaland (5) and BusinessDay (14). The data were subjected to multimodal analysis.
Meanings in the cartoons were evoked using two processes: narrative and conceptual. While
narrative process explains the various actions performed by the represented participants in
the cartoons and the matching speeches, the conceptual process attributes them to the
connective events. Representation takes positive and negative forms. The negative
representation of the candidate of the APC, Muhammadu Buhari, foregrounded bad
leadership, corruption, poor policies, incompetence, religious and ethnic bigotry, insecurity
and wickedness (Punch and BusinessDay). Buhari was symbolically represented as one who
shed the blood of innocent people by giving freedom to killer herdsmen in Nigeria while his
religious and ethnic bigotry were tacitly embedded to have favoured the Fulani against other
ethnic nationalities in the country (Punch, BusinessDay and Vanguard). Negative
representation attributed to Atiku Abubakar of PDP tilted towards economic
mismanagement and corruption. The images conceptualised him as unstable, corrupt and
disobedient (DT and Nairaland). Salience, vector, colour, party emblems, facial
expressions, social distance, accomplishments, shots, symbolism and attributives were used
as visual cues. The positive representations attempted redeeming the images of both
candidates through symbolic repentance gestures (DT, BusinessDay, Punch and Vanguard).
The textual cues evoked were affirmations, exclamations, sarcasm, verbalisations,
metaphorisation, capitalisation, reference, interrogative statements, ellipsis, exaggeration,
repetition, nominal and pronominal choices to complement meanings in the speech process.
Affirmations were used for emphasis, capitalization for clarity and exaggerations for image
enhancement.
Online cartoons during the Nigerian 2019 presidential election campaigns had negativepositive representations, deployed through multimodal means, targeted at influencing the
chances of the represented political actors at the polls.
