RECONTEXTUALISING ISSUES FOR POLITICAL GAINS VIA BILLBOARDS ON GUBERNATORIAL RACE
THE OYO STATE PERSPECTIVE
Abstract
This paper attempts to study the communicative functions embedded in the road side political bill boards mounted by different gubernatorial/ governorship aspirants preparatory to the general elections of 2019 in Nigeria. The paper purposively samples twelve (12) aspirants on the platform of 5 political parties that feature prominently in the state politics to explore lexical and pictorial expressive means as stylistic devices deployed for wooing supporters. Based on contextual theory in conjunction with rhetorical application, the study adopted van Leeuwen’s theory of social semiotic as its framework. Content analysis of the campaign messages contained in the governorship billboards shows how prevalent circumstances were contextualized through slogans, manifestoral statements and how nomination, functionalization, and affiliations are pragmatically deployed to ‘sell’ self to the electorate. Scare tactic was logically deployed to condemn the ‘others’ through some emotive contrast and epithets. Deployment of the technology of photo-cropping in crating symbols for political parties, acronyms and photographs identifying personalities serve as visual accompaniment to the communicative essence of politicking. The paper concludes that the sum up of messages contained in gubernatorial billboards mounted at strategic places on the road side in Nigeria is a virile documentary of reality, manifesting societal woes and the consciousness of intending leaders at the nick of elections to do the needful by their persuasive utterances. Billboards for gubernatorial aspirants are also a platform for linguistic code-mixing/code-switching with recourse to English as constant variable and the language of the immediate environment of the aspirant being the alternative code of reaching out to the wider audience_ the electorate. Through specific argumentation scheme of comparison, with recourse to nomination, identification, functionalization, and exploitation of affiliations, the analysis of positive self, and negative other(s) representation is inherently prevalent in political billboard display.
