“WE WILL TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY FROM BAD GOVERNANCE”: A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDY OF CAMPAIGN TWEETS IN THE 2023 NIGERIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Abstract

Nigeria has faced challenges in governance, economic development, and social development, making life difficult for many of the citizens. Many politicians use this situation to campaign during elections. This paper investigates the campaign tweets of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, and Peter Obi, who were the three leading presidential candidates in the 2023 Nigerian presidential election, to uncover the discourse strategies in the representation of societal issues plaguing the Nigerian state. Previous studies on the campaign discourse of the 2023 Nigerian election have focused mostly on mobilisation strategies, dissemination of ideologies and persuasion without directly investigating the political actors’ position on societal issues. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis and van Dijk’s ideological square, this paper focuses on word frequency lists and concordance analysis to reveal lexical patterns in the tweets. The discourse issues framed around development, leadership and economy are identified through the study of the lexical items. The presidential candidates strategically highlight these issues to position themselves as adept leaders through polarisation, by emphasizing their strengths in addressing these issues, and also emphasizing their opponents’ inability to improve the nation's situation. The findings show that, while Atiku and Obi had more negative tweets disparaging government’s ineffectiveness in improving the living standard of Nigerians, Tinubu focused more on positioning himself as a reliable leader. The study concludes that the “us” versus “them” approach was utilised by the presidential candidates to meet the expectations of the public and present themselves as concerned leaders.