Discourse of resistance in Fani-Kayode’s political posts on Facebook

Abstract

This study examined the discourse of resistance in Fem Fani-Kayode’s (FFK) Facebook posts. FFK’s use of language of resistance has not attracted the attention of scholars, especially in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The thrust of this work is to investigate and examine different resistance strategies in some of his political posts. Data for this work were collected from the Facebook page of Fani-Kayode. The posts were downloaded and saved on the laptop device for further analysis. The work adopts a purposive sampling method in data collection, which was preferred because it allows manual assessment of FFK posts to extract relevant data for this work. Five political posts were selected and downloaded from his Facebook page. The five posts were selected because they discussed critical political and security issues in the country. From the five posts, 12 extracts were culled because of their resourcefulness in the use of resistance strategies. This study adopted qualitative analysis using CDA because CDA helps to unravel inherent ideologies in the posts. The study identified and discussed different resistance strategies in the FFK posts on Facebook and their implications. The identified resistance strategies include: proposition, presupposition, negation, propaganda, and emotive lexis. The study submits that the strategies have political, social and academic implications for society. It concludes that social media users should filter information on the media before they react, to avoid the dissemination of wrong information and prevent conflict in the society.