Discourse Strategies in Selected labour Union Protest Placards on 2023 Fuel Subsidy Removal Protest in Nigeria

Protest strengthens democratic governance by enabling dissent and demands for change. Labour unions’protest placard inscriptions are laced with discourse strategies that amplify voicing their dissent, challenge existing status quo and reinforce mobilisation of workers to bring about achieving a desired change. While protest discourse has been studied from sociological, political, and economic angles, little attention has been given to labour unions’ protest placard from a linguistic perspective. This study addresses this gap by analysing the discourse strategies in labour unions’ protest placards from the 2023 fuel subsidy removal protest in Nigeria, focusing on how discourse strategies are deployed to persuade and enhance mass mobilisation of workers and the public. Drawing on van Dijk’s (2012) Socio-cognitive approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), thirty-five placards were sourced from NLC/TUC archives and Vanguard Online Newspaper. The data consist of fourteen purposively selected placards subjected to a qualitative analysis. The findings show that strategies of Topicalisation, Polarisation, Rhetoric, Number game, and Negative lexicalisation were deployed to sensitise, persuade and mobilise workers for the mass protest. The study concludes that labour unions’ protest placard inscriptions are not arbitrary assemblage of lexical items but viable communicative tools that are laden with succinct strategies of discourse that reinforce persuasion and mass mobilisation of workers, subsequently leading to a possible change.