Satirising Nigeria Education Sector Through Cartoons: A Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

This paper analysed some cartoons connected with Nigeria education with a view to identifying the way verbal and non-verbal meaning is communicated through them. Data for the study comprises nine cartoons which are related to Nigeria's education sector. The data collected were analysed from the purview of Kress and van Leeuwen's (2006) Social Semiotics Theory, a model of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, which developed from Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, to uncover the ideology behind choosing various verbal and non-verbal resources in political and educational related cartoons, to know the extent the portrayal in the cartoons reflect or unveil some realities about the state of the Nigerian educational sector, and to know how the Nigerian educational sector is portrayed through the selected cartoons. The analysis shows that the cartoons were used to satirise the government negligence in handling security among the students and their teachers, poor funding of educational sector, terrorism challenges, kidnapping of school children and their teachers, and poverty. It is obvious that the security challenges in Nigeria's educational sector are not only criticised by cartoonists but serve as means to better restructure the education sector for effective learning to take place. The study observed that the cartoons are not just independent texts or images, but that they are products of the Nigerian social condition, and that understanding them requires a level of familiarity with their contexts of production. It also revealed that, as a means of visual communication, the cartoons exposed the realities in the country and refused to be relegated to simply satirical images of issues and events in the country’s education.