IDEOLOGY AND POWER NEGOTIATION IN #ENDSARS AND #ENDBADGOVERNANCE PROTESTS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

The flexibility of Nigerian socio-political environment makes it a fertile ground for interrogating the nexus between ideology, power, and protest texts as responses to bad governance system. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has a history of authoritarianism, corruption, and democratic fragility. The impetuses of protesters are usually fuelled by these vices that constantly stare us in the eye. The major thrust of this study is to analyse ideology and power negotiation of #EndSARS and #EndBadGovernance protests in Nigeria. The methodology for the study is drawn from social media protest texts generated during the #EndSARS (2020) and #EndBadGovernance (2024) movements in Nigeria. Precisely, 14 Protest Test were selected, and tagged as “PT” in the analysis. Critical Discourse Analysis is deployed as the theoretical framework for the study, particularly Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach. The findings of the study reveal how linguistic choices in digitally mediated texts function as instruments of resistance, ideological construction, and power contestation. Findings further reveal that protest texts deploy strategic polarisation, intertextual references, religious allusions, humour, and evaluative language to construct the state as oppressive and citizens as morally legitimate agents of change. The analysis further demonstrates that digital protest discourse operates as an arena of ideological struggle, where competing narratives of patriotism, legitimacy, justice, and governance are negotiated. The study concludes that social media protest texts are discursive instruments that reshape public consciousness and reconfigure power relations in contemporary Nigeria