#EndBadGovernment Vs #SayNoToProtest: The Multimodality of the Days Of Rage Online Protests and Counter-Protests in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper undertakes a multimodal textual analysis of protests and counter-protests in Nigeria. As viable instruments for forcing di?cult conversations, protests have a recurrent history in Nigeria with varying degrees of impacts and had thus attracted studied attention from multidisciplinary strands. However, sparse focus is given the synergic force of both protests and counter-protests as strategic means of enforcing ideologically-motivated multimodal acts. This study, therefore, explores the multimodal, contextual and ideological features that characterise the construction of the Days of Rage protests and counter-protests in Nigeria. Through the theoretical anchorage of aspects of Kress and Leeuwen’s (1996; 2006) Visual Grammar, thirty (30) protest and counter-protest images were purposively selected from August 1 to August 10, 2024 which come under the harsh tag #EndBadGovernmentInNigeria and #SayNoToProtest with the centralizing theme, The Days of Rage. The study revealed that both protest and counter-protest are entrenched in the contexts of anti/pro-people policy and national prevalence of hardship, (in)security, and corruption. Using the representational and compositional indices of participants, process, circumstance, informational value, salience and framing, these contexts were linked to the ideological frames of solidarism, and ingroup/outgroup polarisation among the protesters and counter-protesters. The contextual and ideological significations are foregrounded through, re-semioticisation of context of protest connected to policy divergence, lexicalized salience through capitalisation, and colour embossing to enact ideological informational value. Protest and counter-protests, in their construct, are constrained by the socio-economic and political triggers of their national enclave and are consequently underlined by connected ideologies that are contextually re-semioticised.