SPECIAL REPORT: How to Engage Nigerian Youths Who Support Politicians on Digital Platforms

With the emergence of the Internet and associated intrusive technologies, in almost all democracies, the era of using physical platforms primarily for political and civic engagement has gone. The world and its people are now ‘dining’ and, at the same time, exchanging words on different digital platforms. Sometimes, the discussions are appealing and useful for the identified needs and problems. On the other hand, some discussions turned sore because participants consciously and unconsciously deployed uncultured words, phrases, and images, among others, to silence each other.

These situations are prevalent in most democracies, particularly in countries with few or no legal restrictions on digital space. According to our observational research, youths are the primary participants who constantly transform any digital platform into a ‘radically discourse negotiated’ terrain. When one considers their expectations in terms of social, economic, and political changes over the years, this behaviour is not surprising. For example, between 2010 and 2022, political leaders in Africa witnessed various forms and dimensions of youth activism. Political leaders in the continent’s north and west, for example, will not quickly forget the massive social and political movements of their youth during the period.

In order to critically engage their political leaders, youths consume news through social media more than they do through traditional media such as print newspapers, radio, and television stations. This, according to our analyst, has been documented in many studies conducted by academics and think tanks. According to our analyst, the consumption of their preferred news via social media is a means of escaping the highly controlled content of traditional media by reporters, editors, and owners.

Therefore, as UNICEF notes, they take pride in creating their own content after reading their preferred socio-political news. “Many youths also engage with digital spaces to develop their civic identities and express their political stance in creative ways, including through videos, memes, and artwork, to claim agency that may not be afforded to them in traditional civic spaces. This dynamic is reimagining the concept of ‘the political’ writ large.”

While it is sometimes convenient to say that the youths are deploying emerging technologies in their own ways to break old political structures that concentrated political engagement and participation in the hands of the elites, it is also important to note that the elites are not leaving any stone unturned when it comes to recruiting some of the youths. Politicians in Africa, for example, have been successful in enlisting some youths as digital image makers. They are succeeding because they are capitalising on some of the socioeconomic challenges that young people face. In this regard, the rise in the unemployment rate has primarily been used as a recruiting tool.

For example, studies conducted by our analyst and his team during the Osun 2018 and 2022 governorship elections revealed the recruitment of youths as data boys and warriors for the purpose of propagating the activities of their paymasters and creating counter- and alternative narratives around the personalities of their leaders. Before, during, and after the elections, both boys and warriors created content that attacked the personalities of opponents of their leaders and people who expressed divergent views about them.

Osun’s example is not quite different from the national elections held in February and March 2023. Our analyst and his colleagues at the Centre for Research on Development of African Media, Governance, and Society and Positive Agenda Nigeria found similar patterns of recruiting the youth. In both studies, it emerged that the recruited youths used what we called the percolated affinity network (PAN) strategy. It is a strategy that helped them employ various features of Twitter and Facebook for constant reinforcement of their messages and ideologies. For instance, when a member creates a post, he or she tags other members and adds one or two members from the opposing group. Basically, they considered blended contexts for engaging and disseminating their messages and ideologies.

After the two elections, our analyst and his team noticed a growth in silencing opposing views by all means, using different strategies and tactics. The recruited boys and warriors want almost everyone to believe that their paymasters lost the elections because of various imbalances in the electoral processes. Whereas some people believe that the processes were fair enough and that there is no democracy in the world that has complete free and fair electoral processes. Since discourses are socially constituted and constructed, these interpretations will continue on various digital platforms. The boys and warriors will continue to use their expectations, social background, and affinity with their leaders to create meaning for voting, collating, and declaring results.

While there are no absolute solutions to the tensions being created on Facebook and Twitter by the boys and warriors, our analyst looks at some of the approaches people can use to critically engage supporters of the three dominant presidential candidates in the 2023 election in this piece.

How to Engage Them

The hallmark of engaging on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites is to express views, and in the course of doing so, we socialise with others by building and sustaining our social capital. However, this experience can be hurtful when one meets people who believe that their views should dominate others. In other words, such people practise what many sociological scholars and philosophers called cultural hegemony or dominance. Therefore, as stated previously, on the Nigerian digital space, one should expect the boys and warriors with the intention of forcing their ideologies and interpretations of the recent general elections onto others.

But there is a solution to that. The solution lies with the encoding and decoding model created by Stuart Hall, a sociologist, several years ago. Hall proposes that audience members can play an active role in decoding messages as they rely on their own social contexts and are capable of changing messages through collective action. Therefore, anyone who consciously or unconsciously comes across the messages of the boys and warriors and also has an interest in engaging them should know that encoding and decoding represent translation for easy understanding of their messages as well as ideologies about the elections.

The first step that the boys and warriors execute is posting messages in different forms. Sometimes, they posted texts without images and texts with images. When they used both, they had different meanings expected to be given to the messages by their audiences. For example, in order to substantiate the poor voting process, they usually added pictures that showed violent places. Where images were not added, they ensured the use of descriptive words and statistics that indicate incorrect imputation of results at some polling units. Simply put, they use various technical elements associated with new media to present and represent what they want you to see and believe.

In this context, they practise what Hall called the dominant or hegemonic code. However, as an active follower or reader, you have negotiation and opposition codes at your disposal to counter their dominant narratives. Though there is a tendency that you will first accept their dominant narratives, the use of the two codes gives you the opportunity to reconstruct their messages and disentangle the inherent ideologies.

Let us use the trending narrative that the presidential election was not free and fair and that the Independent National Electoral Commission rigged the election for the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). This narrative, if we consider the classification of the boys and warriors according to their political interests and candidates, is being mostly disseminated by the supporters of the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi. As an active follower or audience member, you first accept it, but not absolutely, especially when you invoke the negotiation code. So, while using the code, you are combining the dominant and oppositional codes, in which you are expected to reconstruct the narrative with supporting evidence, thus partly accepting and denying the narrative.

However, if you don’t want to portray yourself as a passive receiver of the narrative, the oppositional code needs to be used radically. With this, you need to take a position directly opposite to the dominant narrative and its inherent ideologies. In this case, you deconstruct the hegemonic cultural code and reconstruct it as a code of opposition. It means that you refuse to experience the pleasure of recognition and denounce the narrative’s validity.

The same approach could be used to engage ruling party supporters who are spreading different narratives about Mr. Peter Obi, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and their political parties.