MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF SELECTED NIGERIAN POLITICAL MEMES IN THE 2023 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

In recent years, political memes have emerged as influential instruments of digital communication, particularly in the context of electioneering and civic discourse. In Nigeria, the 2023 presidential election witnessed an unprecedented surge in the production and circulation of political memes, serving not only as vehicles of humour but also as tools of resistance, critique, and ideological positioning. These memes, widely disseminated on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Nairaland, reflect public sentiment and offer a lens through which citizens negotiate meaning in relation to governance, identity, and power. Despite the growing prevalence of these multimodal texts, scholarly attention to their linguistic and semiotic functions within the Nigerian context remains limited. This study addresses this gap by investigating how Nigerian political memes encode ideological meanings through humour and satire, with particular attention to their systemic meta-functional structures. The central aim of the research is to analyse the ways in which political memes produced during the 2023 presidential election communicate political critique and construct social relations through multimodal strategies. Specifically, the study sets out to identify the presence and operation of Halliday’s three meta-functions ideational, interpersonal, and textual within the selected memes; to examine how humour and satire function as tools of critique; and to explore the interplay of textual, visual, and symbolic modes in the construction of political meaning. The analysis is anchored in Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), drawing on Kay O’Halloran’s theoretical extension of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach to examine twenty-one memes sampled from various digital platforms. Each meme is analysed for its semiotic affordances, with attention paid to sentence structure, visual imagery, intertextual references, and culturally embedded symbolism. Findings from the study reveal the consistent presence of all three meta-functions across the dataset, with the ideational function frequently representing political struggle, the interpersonal function negotiating power relations and solidarity, and the textual function enhancing rhetorical coherence and digital virality. Furthermore, the analysis identifies five instances of satire and four instances of humour across the memes, demonstrating how these elements function not only to entertain but also to subvert dominant narratives and critique elite authority. The interaction of multiple semiotic modes particularly the convergence of linguistic choices with visual framing and spatial arrangement emerges as central to the memes’ communicative efficacy. These memes do not operate in isolation; rather, they reflect broader socio-political anxieties and aspirations within Nigeria’s contemporary public discourse.