THE MULTIMODALITY OF SELECTED CAMPAIGN POSTERS OF ATIKU ABUBAKAR IN 2023 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Semiotics plays an important role in the dissemination of information
especially through the use of signs, symbols and images. The study has
become necessary because most political parties in Nigeria use
campaign strategies to lure their supporters and electioneering,
Politicians can go any length to get what they want, hence the thrust
of this paper is to do a multimodal study of campaign posters of the
People’s Democratic Party’s Presidential candidate in the 2023
general elections in Nigeria. The posters were selected based on their
relevance to their study. This study investigates linguistic features and
visual strategies used to persuade the audience to vote for the People’s
Democratic Party in line with the party's ideology. The study adopted
the social semiotic theory to analyse the data purposively sourced
from social media post both on Facebook, and Google engine. Ideas
synthesized from this theory are applied to the posters to reveal their
encoded meanings. Findings reveals that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar was
able to disseminate information and project his political ideology of
the electorate through visual and non-visual messages contained in
the posters. The findings revealed that campaign posters can influence
the choice of the electorate during election as it did to the presidential
candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in some places in
the 2023 general election in Nigeria.