Volume 25, Issue 1 (September 2025)

This study investigates the use of conceptual metaphor in the second chapter of the Holy Quran, focusing on how metaphorical language conveys complex theological, moral, and spiritual concepts. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), the research examines the systematic mapping between source and target domains, revealing how abstract ideas such as faith, guidance, divine justice, and human conduct are made comprehensible through concrete imagery. Purposive Sampling Technique proposed by Lawrence and Palinkas et al. (2015), was employed to select eight metaphors that exhibited identifiable mapping systems relevant to the aim of the study. The analysis identifies recurring metaphorical patterns, including metaphors of light, trade, and disease, and demonstrates their role in shaping readers’ cognitive understanding and emotional engagement with the text. Utilizing Yusuf Ali’s English translation of the Quran as the primary data source. The findings indicate that conceptual metaphors are not merely stylistic devices but function as fundamental mechanisms of cognition that enhance comprehension and interpretation of Quranic teachings. This research contributes to the fields of cognitive linguistics, Quranic studies, and discourse analysis by offering a systematic exploration of metaphorical structures in sacred texts, highlighting both their cognitive significance and theological implications.

Cross-linguistic research on conceptual metaphor requires comparable data, consistent annotation and clear reporting. These requirements become more difficult when the languages being compared have different lexical systems and unequal corpus resources. This article presents a corpus-assisted comparison of visual and auditory perception metaphors in English and Hausa romance fiction. The data come from four English novels containing 520,425 words and twelve Hausa novels containing 521,052 words. AntConc 3.5.7 was used to retrieve the English lemmas see and hear and the Hausa verbs gani and ji. A random sample of 500 citations was examined for each verb. Metaphorical uses were identified through the Metaphor Identification Procedure, while the resulting conceptual mappings were interpreted within Sweetser’s (1990) Mind-as-Body account and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. The audit confirms 565 metaphorical tokens in the four samples: 260 for see, 52 for hear, 151 for gani and 102 for ji. Metaphor incidence was highest for see (52.0%), followed by gani (30.2%), ji (20.4%), and hear (10.4%). The clearest cross-linguistic contrast is that cognition is expressed through vision in the English corpus and through hearing in the Hausa corpus. The study also shows that equal corpus size does not ensure full comparability because the corpora differ in text distribution, author composition, sampling fractions, and lexical polysemy. In particular, Hausa ji requires contextual separation of hearing from feeling, taste and smell. The article therefore presents a transparent workflow that keeps corpus composition, lexical retrieval, metaphor identification, conceptual classification, translation. and reliability assessment as distinct stages.

This study examines how religious plurality, ordinarily a supposed asset, has produced entrenched “Us versus Them” divisions that manifest as dehumanization and stereotyping across religious communities. Drawing on Postcolonial theory, the research uses a qualitative, text-analytic approach to identify portrayals of religious alterity in two contemporary Nigerian novels: Othuke Ominiabohs’ A Conspiracy of Raven, and Sule Egya’s Sterile Sky. The analysis reveals cases of “Us verus Them” relations among religious groups that enthrones hatred and violence in the postcolony. The study argues that harmonized practice of religious pluralism can be reconceived as transformative social practice rather than mere demographic fact. This awareness, if extended to real world situations, would ensure better understanding and protection of every individual’s religious right and dignity.

Cultural multiplicity is a growing concept in migration studies globally, it has some salient merits on the lives of the migrants, but its challenges are often worrisome as portrayed in Sola Owonibi’s The Black Men of Bissonnet Street. Previous critical engagements on cultural multiplicity have often focused on cultural hybridity and cultural loss with little or no attention paid to cultural multiplicity and its attendant dilemmatic effects on the life of African migrants and their families. This paper, therefore, attempts to investigate the complex interplay between African migrants, cultural multiplicity and its consequences in the migrants’ marital and familial matters. The data for the study is the primary text which is Sola Owonibi’s The Black Men of Bissonnet Street. It will be subjected to critical textual analysis. Inspirations will be drawn from Homi Bhabha’s model of Migration and Hybridity Theory as the theoretical framework. It is discovered that cultural multiplicity has some advantages in the lives of the migrants. It is discovered that the challenges of cultural multiplicity are dilemmatic to the migrants. The paper concludes that cultural multiplicity has disintegrated the peace and harmony in the migrants’ marital affairs and families and as such, Africans should have a rethink before migrating to foreign countries to seek greener pastures.

The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of an interdisciplinary relationship between literature and medicine, a dialogue that has continued to attract attention within Nigerian literary studies. This study addresses the problem of traumatized voicing among relatives of sick characters in contemporary Nigerian fiction. While illness has often been examined from the perspective of the patient, less attention has been given to the psychological burden borne by caregivers who endure the anguish of watching loved ones confront life-threatening conditions. Their fractured expressions of pain highlight a critical gap in both medical humanities and literary discourse. Adopting psychoanalytic and trauma theories as frameworks, this study interrogates the narratives in Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters Who Walk This Path and Ayobami Adebayo’s Stay with Me, examining how the authors’ succinctly capture the disorientation and fragmented voices of relatives as they struggle with the dual task of caregiving and self-preservation. The findings reveal that guilt, denial, repression, displacement, transference and sublimation are literary representations of relatives’ traumatized responses to pathological disorder. The study concludes that illness narratives in Nigerian fiction extend beyond the patient’s experience to expose caregivers' precarious emotional states.

Sexual violence inflicted on migrants and women of colour has always been rendered insignificant by their host communities, perpetuating the inequalities of gender, race, class, social mobility, citizenship status and nationality. The media, anti-sexual violence activism and anti-rape law are not built to address the sexual violence against African migrant women, thereby rendering these victims subjects of media and societal scrutiny, mockery and objects of caricature. Reading Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count, this study applies the implicit bias theory as the primary framework to examine the Western media’s framing and mainstream perceptions of sexual assault against women of colour, without institutional power. It analyses the challenges of narrating sexual violence by the victims, and the unconscious biases against victims, which lead to victim-blaming tendencies. Intersectionality is applied as the complementary framework to clarify how immigration, gender, class and race interact in the novel’s depiction of gender-based violence. Through qualitative and textual analysis of Kadiatou’s narrative, inspired by the Nafissatou Daillo case, the paper shows that implicit biases in Western media strengthen intersectional oppression and expose the limits of Western anti-rape law in sexual violence involving migrant African women and men-in-power using Adichie’s Dream Count.

This paper examines the novel as a cultural artefact in Africa through Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between (1965), and Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966). It argues that these novels transcend their literary and aesthetic functions by documenting, preserving and interrogating the cultural practices, beliefs, values, social structures and worldviews of African communities. Drawing on literature as a repository of cultural memory, the study examines Achebe’s representation of Igbo communal life, oral traditions, religious beliefs, governance and social hierarchies; Ngũgĩ’s depiction of Gikuyu spirituality, land, initiation rites, and communal identity; and Nwapa’s treatment of Igbo marriage, motherhood, religion, gender expectations and women’s economic agency. The analysis is grounded in Frantz Fanon’s theory of national culture and Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. Using qualitative textual analysis, the study demonstrates that these representations are neither static nor merely celebratory. Rather, the novels preserve cultural knowledge while critically interrogating traditions that generate exclusion, conflict and gendered oppression. The paper concludes that the African novel functions as a cultural artefact through which African writers reclaim histories, preserve indigenous knowledge, and negotiate tensions between tradition, colonial influence, and social transformation.

TikTok has emerged as one of Nigeria’s most dominant digital cultural platforms, having significantly expanded its Nigerian user base in recent years to become a primary engine of cultural production among urban youth. However, the relationship between this platform and Nigeria’s rich oral literary heritage remains largely unexamined in literary scholarship. This paper investigates what the encounter between TikTok’s platform architecture and Nigerian oral storytelling traditions, including Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa oral forms, may mean for the future of those traditions. Drawing on Walter Ong’s theory of secondary orality, Isidore Okpewho’s oral performance scholarship, Richard Bauman’s performance-centred approach to verbal art, and platform studies scholarship on algorithmic aesthetic constraint, the paper proposes the concept of compressed orality to describe the specific aesthetic formation that may emerge when Nigerian oral storytelling meets TikTok’s platform architecture. Compressed orality tends to preserve the performative surfaces of oral tradition whilst foreclosing its structural and epistemological depths. The paper identifies three structural foreclosures: the abolition of live co-presence, temporal compression, and the algorithmic reassignment of cultural authority and argues that understanding these foreclosures is essential for Nigerian oral literature scholarship, literary education, and cultural policy.

This paper explores the (re)construction of postcolonial identity in Sefi Atta's A Bit of Difference, emphasising how language, imitation, and cultural reality interact to shape Nigerians' identities at home and abroad. Employing a qualitative textual reading of the novel, the study examines how Deola Bello, the main character, and other characters negotiate identity through linguistic performance and accent, which become both a site of internal conflict for the postcolonial subject and a survival strategy. To counter Western acculturation, migrants strategically affirm, challenge, and recreate a dynamic Nigerian identity. The study draws its interpretive framework from postcolonial theory, particularly the ideas of Homi K. Bhabha and Ashcroft et al. A close reading of language, accent, and characters’ identities serves as the study’s analytical method. The study argues that Atta's novel depicts identity as an unstable, constantly renegotiated construct, divided between the homeland and the hostland, rather than as a fixed heritage. The study concludes that A Bit of Difference effectively conveys the complexity of the Nigerian diasporic experience, demonstrating that mimicry functions not merely as assimilation but as a deliberate strategy through which Deola and other characters reconstruct a hybrid identity, and that linguistic accent operates as a marker of this ongoing negotiation, presenting identity and its nuanced features as a constructive site of tension.

In most African countries as in Nigeria, colonialism introduced an exploitative system in which the people and their lands were subjected to intensive extraction. This exploitation of the environment has continued as a colonial residue, with natural elements constantly destroyed decades after formal colonialism ended. Postcolonial writers, particularly Eco-poets, have foregrounded environmental destruction as one of the most devastating colonial outcomes. This paper examines Nnimmo Bassey’s I Will Not Dance to Your Beat and Richard Inya’s Katakata as ecocritical poems that mirror how both poets portray the continued existence of colonial systems of environmental exploitation. It employs postcolonial ecocriticism as its guiding framework, drawing particularly on Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s tenets that link contemporary environmental damage to colonial histories. The study finds that both poets portray the language of erasure and mechanisation of nature as colonial patterns of exploitation that still dictate Nigeria’s environmental destruction. By revealing these ongoing systems of environmental damage, the paper concludes that both Bassey and Inya link contemporary pollution to enduring power structures, while also making eco-destruction a site of active political resistance.

The twenty-first century has witnessed several geopolitical conflicts characterised by extensive media coverage and strategic political communication. Yet scholarly attention focuses on collective memory and its role in shaping national identities, with limited attention to trauma as a rhetorical strategy within contemporary war speeches. This study, therefore, examines the rhetorical deployment of trauma in five war declaration speeches each delivered by Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas, and Ismail Haniyeh. Drawing on Caruth’s Trauma Theory, the study investigated how traumatic experiences, and narratives of victimhood are strategically articulated to construct political identities, and justify military actions. Using 15 excerpts drawn from the purposively selected contemporary war speeches which were retrieved from the internet, the research explores victimisation narratives through qualitative and quantitative approaches to reveal how trauma functions not merely as a record of suffering but as a rhetorical resource through which political leaders legitimise resistance and reinforce ideological positions. The speeches recurrently invoke historical wounds, national insecurity, and existential threats to cultivate solidarity and sustain political action. The study concludes that trauma discourse occupies a central position in contemporary war rhetoric, serving as a powerful mechanism for negotiating identity, memory, power, and legitimacy within conflict situations.

This study examines the discursive construction of female identity in Adichie’s Dream Count. Existing studies have examined identity construction in social media, naming practices, promotional discourse, and selected literary works, including Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, but limited attention has been given to Dream Count. To address this gap, the study analyses purposively selected thirty-five excerpts from the novel using van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Studies. The findings show that identity is discursively constructed through self-representation/self-positioning, other-representation, comparison, polarisation, negotiation and resistance. These strategies construct and negotiate social, religious, gendered, and national identities. The study concludes that identity is not fixed, but emerges through discursive choices that activate particular mental models which are connected to socially shared knowledge.

Existing scholarship on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah has examined racism, racial identity, diaspora, gender, hair, language, and immigrant experiences. However, the specific ways racial microaggressions shape the negotiation and reconstruction of Black immigrant identity remain insufficiently foregrounded. This study addresses this gap by employing Critical Race Theory (CRT) to examine the relationship between racial microaggressions and identity formation in Americanah. Through a close reading of the experiences of Ifemelu, Obinze, Aunty Uju, and Dike, the study demonstrates how subtle verbal, behavioural, and institutional forms of racial discrimination influence their sense of self, belonging, and social position in the United States and the United Kingdom. The study finds that these experiences compel the characters to negotiate aspects of their identity, including accent, hair, language, appearance, and cultural belonging, resulting in conformity, internalised racism, resistance, and identity reconstruction. The paper contributes to existing scholarship by foregrounding racial microaggressions as a significant mechanism through which Black immigrant identities are negotiated within transnational spaces.

This paper argues that Yoruba epistemology constitutes a sophisticated, internally coherent system of knowledge acquisition that fundamentally resists reductionist methodologies characteristic of modern Western philosophy of science. Where reductionism operative in disciplines such as analytical chemistry, molecular biology, and classical physics seeks to explain phenomena by decomposing them into their constituent parts, Yoruba epistemology proceeds from the ontological conviction that reality is irreducibly relational. Within the Yoruba intellectual tradition, knowledge is not the product of isolating variables or dissecting wholes into atomistic units. It emerges from the dynamic interplay of persons, community, spiritual forces, moral disposition, and cosmic order. Drawing on indigenous Yoruba philosophical concepts including Ìmọ̀ (knowledge), Ọgbọ́n (wisdom), Òye (understanding), Àṣà (culture/tradition), and the foundational notion of Ori (personal essence), this paper demonstrates how the Yoruba epistemic framework privileges wholeness, relationality, and participatory knowing. It further situates Yoruba epistemology within contemporary debates in African philosophy, contrasting it with both Western analytic epistemology and other African holistic traditions. The paper contends that a serious philosophical engagement with Yoruba epistemology not only enriches cross-cultural philosophy of knowledge but also offers a corrective to the epistemic limitations of reductionism in addressing complex human and ecological questions. This paper proceeds by philosophical reconstruction and comparative conceptual analysis, drawing on scholarship of Yoruba and African philosophers rather than by empirical or ethnographic fieldwork. Its scope is delimited to four representative domains, namely medicine, ethics, cosmology, and ecology, rather than a comprehensive ethnographic survey.

This study investigates the relationship between linguistic hegemony and environmental consciousness in postcolonial Africa through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness. Drawing from Anibal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power, the study argues that language functions as an instrument through which colonial and neo-colonial systems shape relationships with land, ecology and indigenous knowledge. While existing scholarship on the novels has emphasized religion, politics and identity, the ecological implications of linguistic dominance remain underexplored. Integrating coloniality of power with decolonial ecology, the study demonstrates how colonial-modern concepts such as development, progress, civilization, globalization and modernity legitimize environmental exploitation and distance communities from ancestral ecological knowledge. The findings show that colonial discourse normalizes environmental degradation, cultural alienation and neo-colonial dependency. However, the novels also present indigenous languages, oral traditions, cultural memory and hybrid speech as forms of epistemic resistance that restore communal and sustainable relationships with the land. The study concludes that sustainable ecological futures require prioritizing indigenous epistemologies over colonial-modern paradigms that commodify nature.

Family dynamics are the unique patterns of communication between family members, which unveils how they negotiate roles and power relations, and secure emotional connections. This paper explores visual and linguistic resources in selected Taaooma’s YouTube comedy skits, to explore how humor is constructed and how Nigerian cultural practices and family dynamics are encoded in humor and satirical contents. Kress’s (2010) Multimodality serves as the theoretical framework. Data for the study comprises five selected Taaooma’s comedy skits, produced in Nigeria. The findings reveal that Taaooma employs costume and makeup, gesture, language and dialogue, setting and character, to reflect and reinforce Nigerian cultural practices and societal issues. These semiotic resources demonstrate that comedy skits are products of multiple layering of communicative modes. The study concludes that Taaooma’s comedy skits functions as social commentary that critiques everyday social tensions: parental control versus youthful resistance, religious ideals versus moral lapses, and shifting gender expectations within the Nigerian household. The research therefore positions her skits as significant multimodal texts that contribute to the understanding of sociocultural and communicative practices in Nigeria.

This study examines how selected Nigerian Pentecostal posters recontextualise everyday language and experience as religiously meaningful problems and anticipated sites of divine intervention. It applies qualitative multimodal discourse analysis to a purposive corpus of twenty posters selected for this study. Multimodal Social Semiotics provides the principal framework, while recontextualisation serves as a supporting analytical concept. Poster-by-poster analysis shows that Nigerian Pidgin, colloquial English, interrogatives, imperatives, taboo language and culturally familiar references are coordinated with portraiture, gaze, gesture, typography, colour and composition. These resources frame financial insecurity, marital anxiety, interpersonal grievance and perceived obstruction through Pentecostal problem-intervention narratives. The study conceptualises this patterned transformation as multimodal sacralisation of everyday Nigerian experience.

The expansion of Nigeria's fintech sector has increased the prominence of digital promotional images as strategic tools to communicate with consumers. Although they are at the core of the promotion of fintech products and services, the organisation of their multimodal resources for meaning-making remains underexplored. The study, therefore, investigates the compositional systems of the multimodal resources in selected Nigerian fintech promotional images. The data, which comprise ten purposively selected promotional images from Nigerian fintech companies’ digital platforms were analysed qualitatively using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) socio-semiotic approach to multimodality. The findings indicate that visual, verbal, and spatial resources combine within compositional systems to direct the viewer's gaze, manage relationships among elements, and create coherent communicative wholes. These systems also encode ideological meanings, presenting technology as a solution and fintech services as desirable tools in users' everyday lives. The study shows that compositional systems dominate how people frame perceptions of technology, finance, and user identity today.

Nigeria’s cultural diversity and growing consumer market provide a context for examining how food packaging and labelling communicate brand and cultural meanings. This study examines the multimodal discourse of food product labels and packaging in Nigeria, focusing on food seasonings and spices. Six food products were purposively selected from the Nigerian food market. Adopting a qualitative research approach and an ex post facto research design, data were analysed using Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996) Visual Grammar, with particular emphasis on the compositional metafunction, namely information value, salience, and framing. The findings show that topography, colour, images, and symbolism are combined to establish product identity, communicate product information, and create visual salience. The analysis further reveals the use of culturally recognisable food images, patterns, colours, and symbols that associate the products with Nigerian culinary practices and cultural experiences. The packaging also predominantly uses English, while French appears on some products, suggesting an orientation towards a wider West African market. The study demonstrates that food packaging functions beyond product identification to construct cultural and commercial meanings through multimodal resources. It highlights the importance of culturally and contextually relevant packaging in communicating food products in Nigeria.

Celebrity culture is an extension of popular culture that curates celebrities’ identities and lifestyles in the 21st century. The public visibility of these celebrities depend heavily on the media. Therefore, this study examines the multimodal nexus in which African celebrities are constructed, negotiated, and contested during the 2025 Africa Magic Viewers’ Choice Awards (AMVCA) Cultural Day. Using a qualitative, descriptive methodology, this research analyses the purposive selection of Ten (10) gendered images that represent African cultural heritage to adequately explore the semiotic ensembles deployed by these celebrities during the 2025 AMVCA cultural day and how the media represented them. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s visual grammar is deployed to analyse the data mapped out for this study, enabling a holistic interpretation of how meaning is construed visually leaving the textual dimension. The findings reveal that semiotic tools such as fashion, colour, and accessories interlock to construct cultural identities of African celebrities. Additionally, female gender is concerned with self-assertion rather societal valuation. This research contributes to the understanding of cultural preservation within the modern media landscape.

Abuse and victimisation of persons with disabilities (PWDs) are recurring concerns in disability discourse, yet limited attention has been given to how advocacy organisations construct these experiences through coordinated verbal and visual resources. The study examines the representation of abuse and victimisation of PWDs in five purposively selected graphics posted on the official Instagram page of the Disability Rights Advocacy Centre (DRAC) in 2022. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive research design and employs Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), integrating Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG). The analysis examines ideational/representational, interpersonal/interactive, and textual/compositional meanings realised through dialogue, participant roles, gaze, social distance, framing, information value, salience, colour, posture, and layout. Findings reveal five related patterns of abuse: neglect and social isolation; institutional dismissal and derogatory language; sexual objectification and exploitation; social denigration and discrimination; and economic exploitation accompanied by threats to mobility. The findings further show that linguistic and visual choices not only depict abuse but also assign responsibility, construct unequal power relations, and position viewers to recognise the rights and agency of PWDs. The study demonstrates how advocacy graphics can expose and contest discourses that normalise abuse against PWDs.

This article examines four Nigerian memetic expressions, Sapa no fit catch me, No gree for anybody, You go explain taya, and Na you sabi, as cultural texts through Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model. Rather than treating them as statistically representative of Nigerian social media, the study uses qualitative, theory-led close reading to investigate how vernacular humour organises meanings of economic precarity, defiance, distrust, exhaustion, and withdrawal. The analysis distinguishes preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings while extending Hall’s model through the concept of recursive re-encoding, the process by which users interpret a circulating expression and reposition it through reposting, captioning, remixing, or contextual relocation. Findings show that the expressions are politically ambivalent: they may normalise individual endurance and self-responsibility, but they can also expose institutional failure, challenge credibility, and create affective forms of everyday resistance. The article therefore offers a culturally situated account of how decoding becomes renewed encoding in contemporary African digital culture while recognising the limits of resistance claims without direct audience data.

This study examines how emojis and stickers function as multimodal resources in the WhatsApp-mediated academic discourse of the National Association of Students of English and Literary Studies (NASELS), Federal University of Kashere, Nigeria. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2001) social semiotic approach, the study adopts a qualitative descriptive design to analyse 75 purposively selected chat threads containing 243 emojis and 126 stickers. The findings show that emojis and stickers perform affective, pragmatic, interpersonal, humorous, and identity-related functions, extending and sometimes substituting for verbal messages. While emojis primarily provide emotional and pragmatic cues, stickers often convey more elaborate expressive and interactional meanings and can function as standalone communicative acts. Both resources contribute to managing interpersonal relations, signalling shared humour, modifying the force of expressions, and reinforcing group identity. The study demonstrates that meaning in student WhatsApp interaction is constructed through the coordinated use of verbal and visual modes rather than through text alone. It contributes to research on digital discourse and multimodality by showing how Nigerian university students deploy emojis and stickers as integral semiotic resources for meaning-making and social interaction in digitally mediated academic communication.

This paper investigates how categorisation functions as an ideological discursive strategy in Twitter (X) discourse surrounding the 2023 Nigerian presidential election. Categorisation, understood here as the linguistic labelling of individuals and groups according to social identities such as ethnicity, region, and religion, is analysed as a key resource through which political actors and ordinary citizens construct legitimacy and delegitimacy online. Drawing on Fairclough's socio-cultural model and van Dijk's socio-cognitive framework, the study examines ten purposively selected tweets, drawn to reflect a range of ethnic, regional, and partisan viewpoints rather than a single narrative, to show how ethnic, geopolitical, and religious identities were constructed and mobilised during online political debate. The findings show that Twitter users repeatedly used categorisation to draw ingroup-outgroup boundaries, invoke stereotypes, legitimise preferred candidates, and delegitimise opponents, using identity markers such as Yoruba, Igbo, Fulani, Obidient, and the Muslim-Muslim ticket to stake out positions on legitimacy, power, fairness, and national unity. Rather than treating these claims as settled fact, the analysis treats them as perceptions and rhetorical positions being contested online, and reads them against each other to show how competing groups mobilise similar discursive strategies for different ends. The study contributes a micro-linguistic account of ideological representation to research on Nigeria's digital political sphere, and argues that understanding contemporary Nigerian political communication requires attention to the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic processes through which citizens construct and contest political meaning online.