The 'Balablu Bulaba' Campaign Gaffe and the Nigerian Digital Dissent: Perspectives from Culpeper’s Impoliteness Formulae

Pre-election activities and campaign speeches by Nigerian politicians have been well documented in media (humanistic and social scientific) studies; however, the ways citizens use online communicative platforms to express their (de)satisfaction with campaign moves have not enjoyed as much scholarly attention. The paper explores impoliteness strategies and linguistic forms deployed by the Nigerian Online Community (NOC) to interrogate the 'Balablu Bulaba' gaffe made by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (henceforth, BAT) during his 2023 presidential election campaign. This is motivated by the fact that online reactions, just like online voting, are not always considered a genuine platform for opinion; however, they cause a great shift in the NOC’s political stance. For data, 150 online trail comments on the reports of BAT’s gaffe were purposively sampled from three online media platforms (TVC News YouTube handle, Punch Online Newspaper, and Nairaland online community website), transposed to MS Word with line numbers, and subjected to pragmatic analysis, with insights from Culpeper’s impoliteness formulae and aspects of lexical semantics discourse. Four impoliteness strategies are revealed: negative impoliteness, positive impoliteness, bald on-record impoliteness, and mock politeness. All these are deployed through lexical resources with derogatory comparisons, negative associations, and laughing emojis to ridicule BAT, exaggerate his incompetence, challenge his supporters, and allude to better presidential candidates. With the noticeable predominance of negative impoliteness realised with multimodal linguistic forms, it can be inferred that the NOC may have been disappointed with BAT’s presidential candidacy and his general performance in the election campaign speeches.