Multimodal Satire as Political Discourse: A Systemic-Functional Analysis of Visual and Verbal Modes in Mustapha Bulama’s Cartoons

The study examines into the nature of satire as political discourses in the editorial cartoons of Mustapha Bulama, a Nigerian cartoonist of the Daily Trust Newspaper. The analysis relies on Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (1978) as well as Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) theory of the grammar of visual design, and a purposively selected corpus of cartoons, covering the period of 2020-2025, on insecurity, police brutality, electoral politics and economic hardship. The hand-coded analysis of the qualitative content of Bulama's cartoons reveals that the concept of a political actor is formed via the construction of transitivity, which assigns agency to some participants and denies it to others; and that the gaze and social distance of the viewer and the camera angle play a role that reduces the power of the state while increasing the power of ordinary citizens as moral observers. Colour, framing, and salience also help to guide the focus towards the evaluative position of the cartoonist, allowing the comic to serve as a wedge of humour and critique at the same time, through incongruity, irony, and caricature without losing the fun of the comic form. It suggests that this combination of image and word allows Bulama to express criticism that straight news reporting, constrained by standards of balance and caution, cannot easily convey. It presents a systemic-functional model that can be replicated in reading and interpretation of editorial cartoons of the Nigerian press, and has expanded the scholarship of Bulama's work from the single issue, crisis-based approach to a larger, satire-based approach.