FROM CONSUMERS TO SHAREHOLDERS: MULTIMODAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF IDENTITY AND OWNERSHIP IN DANGOTE IPO MEMES

This article examines how corpus of Dangote initial public offering (IPO) memes, represented in screen shots image files and coded set of 17 verbal examples, constructs ordinary Nigerians as shareholders, co-owners, managers and participants in corporate authority. The corpus consists of seven mock directives and ten mock ownership claims, with captions attributed to the handles recorded in the source material. Combining Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, Austin and Searle’s speech-act theory, Martin and White’s Appraisal framework, Gricean implicature, politeness theory and Benign Violation Theory, the analysis shows that the memes do not simply celebrate investment. They transform a small purchase into a temporary social identity whose privileges include calling Dangote, disciplining staff, claiming trucks and refinery products, demanding returns, and treating a corporate brand as family property. The central humour arises from the mismatch between the grammatical force of the captions and the speakers’ limited institutional authority. Nigerian Pidgin, Nigerian English, possessive pronouns, direct address, emojis and reaction-image conventions make this mismatch affiliative rather than hostile. The memes therefore perform a double movement: they symbolically democratise corporate belonging while exposing the distance between retail shareholding and control. The article argues that meme discourse makes ownership imaginable before it makes ownership materially powerful, and that humour provides a socially safe form through which economic aspiration, entitlement and anxiety can be negotiated.