The afterlives of propaganda: media archeology, everyday labor, and postcolonial statecraft in Nigeria’s 2023 election

This article rethinks propaganda in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election by locating viral memes, short videos, WhatsApp forwards, and influencer-driven campaign narratives within a longer genealogy of Nigerian political communication. Focusing on digital content that questioned Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s mental and physical fitness, the article argues that propaganda in 2023 operated not simply as elite disinformation but as decentralised, affective, and precarious digital labour. Drawing on digital ethnography, interviews with student creators, party volunteers, and platform-based gig workers, and a media-archaeological reading of colonial rumour surveillance, wartime broadcasting, postcolonial pamphleteering, cassette circulation, and social-media politics, the article shows how older vernacular practices of political persuasion were recomposed through platform capitalism. The 2023 election was not Nigeria’s first social media-involved election; rather, it marked a new phase in which TikTok video, influencer labour, WhatsApp forwarding, Facebook mobilisation, and X/Twitter combat operated with unprecedented coordination, velocity, and decentralised intensity. By reading Nigerian digital propaganda through governmentality, postcolonial statecraft, encoding/decoding, and necropolitics, the article reframes the digital citizen not only as a victim of misinformation but also as a participant in the political economy of visibility.