A multimodal study of campaign posters of the Labour Party’s Presidential candidate in 2023 general elections in Nigeria

Abstract

The relevance of multimodal features of campaign posters in disseminating intended information to the Nigerian electorate during the 2023 General Elections in Nigeria is the focus of this research. The study examines six selected political campaign posters of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party who featured in the presidential election. These posters were chosen because of the researcher’s conviction that they constitute key elements in expressing the identity and ideology of Peter Obi and his political party. The purpose of this study is to analyse six campaign posters of Peter Obi and assess the effectiveness of the visual and linguistic components in influencing or persuading the electorate to vote for him as president of Nigeria under the auspices the Labour Party. The study adopted the social semiotic theory to analyse the data purposively sourced from Facebook and WhatsApp. Ideas synthesized from this theory are applied to the posters to reveal their encoded meanings. The paper reveals that Peter Obi was able to disseminate information and project his political ideology on the minds of the electorate through visual and non-visual messages contained in the posters. The conclusion of this study indicates that the campaign posters helped in influencing the decision of the electorate in voting for the Labour Party’s presidential candidate to create a healthy rivalry among the contestants for president of Nigeria in the 2023 General Elections.