Satire as Discourse: Examining Power, Speech, and Suffering in Nigerian Political Cartoons

Abstract

Editorial cartoons are multimodal texts that combine visual satire and concise language to comment on political and social issues. In Nigeria, they serve as important platforms for public critique, often exposing the failures of governance and the contradictions of political rhetoric. Existing studies on Nigerian political cartoons have focused largely on their historical role during the military era or analysed their humour and stylistic features in isolation. However, few have employed a systematic discourse-analytic framework to examine how these cartoons function ideologically within contemporary democratic settings. This study fills that gap by applying Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to three selected cartoons from mainstream Nigerian media. Drawing on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, the study analyses three editorial cartoons carefully chosen from the mainstream Nigerian press. The analysis is structured around issue-driven categories, which were tagged as the spectacle of national suffering, recycling of corruption, and empty political rhetoric, revealing how cartoonists use metaphor, irony, modality, and intertextuality to expose contradictions between elite discourse and lived public realities. At the textual level, the cartoons undermine familiar tropes and ritualised expressions; at the level of discursive practice, they recontextualise political slogans and national symbols; and at the level of social practice, they function as resistance discourse, challenging hegemonic narratives of reform, legitimacy, and progress. The findings show that editorial cartoons are not neutral illustrations but complex semiotic texts that reflect and reshape public discourse. They provide accessible, culturally embedded forms of critique that question the legitimacy of state narratives and offer alternative framings of political reality. The study affirms the relevance of Critical Discourse Analysis for analysing multimodal texts and highlights the political function of humour and satire in Nigeria’s mediated public sphere.