‘Nigeria is fighting Covid-419’: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of political protest in Nigerian coronavirus-related internet memes

Abstract

This paper examines political protest in 40 purposively sampled internet memes circulated among Nigerian WhatsApp users during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a view to exploring the thematic preoccupation, ideology, and the representation of participants and processes in the memes. The data, which were subjected to qualitative analysis, are examined from a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach. The analysis reveals that the memes are used to protest corruption, perceived government deceit, insecurity, hunger, and inadequate health facilities and other social amenities. These are done in order to project and resist an anti-welfarist ideology and emphasise the negative representation of the government.