(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2019-06-28) Akinwotu, Samuel Alaba
The performance of Nigeria’s tertiary education sector has been undermined on
numerous occasions by labour conflicts. While these labour disputes are widely
reported in the media, there has been only minimal scholarly examination of the
discourses that predominate in the media during these conflicts. Using the critical
discourse analysis (CDA) and conceptual metaphor (CM) frameworks, this study
examined the discursive features of a labour conflict in 2013 between the Academic
Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN).
Statements by ASUU and FGN officials and their supporters, as published by Nigerian
print and online news sources during the dispute, were purposively sampled, along
with media outlets’ editorial statements and readers’ online comments. It was found
that the labour dispute was discursively and metaphorically constructed in militaristic
terms, as a conflict between two enemies engaged in a kind of battle or war. It was
also found that both ASUU and the FGN engaged in propagandistic discourses in
line with their militaristic discursive constructions, and that the two sides propagated
disparaging discourses in respect of each other’s motivations and behaviours. It was
also found that certain readers reproduced elements of the prevailing discourses in
their online comments on media coverage of the strike.