Discursive representation of Boko Haram terrorism in selected Nigerian newspapers

Boko Haram and terrorism

Boko Haram (BH), a Hausa version of ‘Western education is forbidden’, is a militant Islamic group otherwise known as Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati Wal-Jihad. It is a group of people of Proselytism and Jihad – the people committed to the propagation of the Prophet Mohammed’s teachings and Jihad. The name ‘Boko Haram’ is derived from a combination of Hausa word ‘boko’ (book) and the Arabic word ‘haram’ (unlawful). Combined, BH means ‘Western education is unlawful’. Meanwhile, BH prefers the slogan ‘Western culture is forbidden’, because culture is broader than education. The BH movement is an outgrowth of the Maitatsine uprising of the 1980s and the religious and ethnic tensions that followed in the late 1990s (Adesoji, 2011). The word ‘jama’, in the official name of the group, places the group within the context of a larger family of jihadist Muslim Jama’a groups, including the Jama’a Islamiyya of Egypt and the Jemaa Islamiyya of Southeast Asia (Indonesia). Hence, it is not an isolated group. Its approach may be deduced from the identity and behavioural pattern of the Jama’a groups which focus on the ‘establishment of small groups of a diffuse nature, which then infiltrate the parent non-Muslim or pseudo-Muslim society, with the ultimate aim of establishing the Muslim Sharia state through a final violent stage’ (Cook, 2011: 8).

Terrorism is ‘hard to concisely define’ (Hoffman, 1998: 13), especially because there are several written definitions of the terms terrorism and terrorist. To Hoffman (1998), terrorism is the ‘deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change’ (p. 43). Hoffman identifies five attributes of terrorism, which include political aims and motives, the involvement of violence or threat, the attempt to cause wide psychological influence to people other than the direct target(s), carried out by an organisation with identifiable command structure, and a ‘subnational … or non-state entity’ group. The act is inhuman; hence, to Chitty (2003), terrorism is effectively ‘anti-democratic’ since it adopts strategies that lie beyond the borders of humanitarian values. For this study, terrorism can be seen as a criminal act directed against a state and intended to create a state of terror in the minds of a government, a group of persons or the public. Based on the views expressed here, the BH group, a group that has been attacking African countries like Nigeria, the North Region of Cameroon, Niger and Chad, can be labelled as a terrorist organisation, as confirmed and emphasised by the American government and other world leaders.

Mohammed Yusuf founded BH in 2002 in the city of Maiduguri with the goal of establishing a Sharia government in Borno State under then Senator Ali Modu Sheriff (Adesoji, 2010). Mohammed Yusuf got undivided loyalty from a large number of youths because of his establishment of a religious complex in his hometown, including a mosque and a school, where many poor families from across Nigeria and neighbouring countries enrolled their children. He provided one meal a day to each of his disciples and introduced a youth empowerment scheme: he helped his disciples to go into petty trading, and arranged cheap marriages between group members, which enabled many of them to marry and which gave them personal dignity and self-worth (Mustapha, 2012). Mohammed Yusuf noted that ‘Western education is mixed with issues that run contrary to our beliefs in Islam … our land was an Islamic state before the colonial masters turned it to a “kafir” [infidel] land’. The group is opposed to what it perceives as a Western-based incursion that erodes traditional values, beliefs and customs among Muslim communities.

The BH group worked as a recruiting ground for future jihadists to fight the state. It initially called itself the ‘Nigerian Taliban’, adopted a ‘live-off-the-land’ lifestyle and set up a camp in a remote area of northeast Nigeria, which the group dubbed ‘Afghanistan’ (Agbiboa, 2014). According to Umar (2011), BH

[Boko Haram] strove for self-exclusion of its members from the mainstream corrupt society by living in areas outside or far away from society in order to intellectualize and radicalize the revolutionary process that would ultimately lead to violent takeover of the [Nigerian] state.

Although the group had been in existence since 2001–2002, its impact was not significantly felt in Nigeria until 2009. From the early 2000s to 2009, BH was engaged in low-level conflict with local police forces and non-compliant villagers. However, in 2009 there was a crackdown on BH members from the Nigerian police force in Borno State. During the sacking of the group’s hideout at the Dutsen Tanshi area of Bauchi on 26 July 2009 by a joint security team, nine of its members were arrested and materials for making bombs and other weapons were confiscated. There were reprisal attacks by the group members on police formations in Bauchi two hours later, and eventually in the other three states (Bakare et al., 2009: 5; Owuamanam et al., 2009: 2–3). This led to the death of 39 BH members, two police officers and one soldier. This ignited a five-day (25 July–30 July 2009) continuous fight between the group and security personnel. There were violent attacks and counter-attacks which spread across the four states of Bauchi, Kano, Yobe and Borno; Maiduguri in Borno State was the most affected during the attack. The estimate showed that over 700 people, mostly group members, were killed, and public buildings like police stations, prisons, government offices, schools and churches destroyed (Oyegbile and Lawal, 2009: 67–71). The five-day attack ended on 30 July 2009, when the Nigerian security forces captured and killed the group’s leader, Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, in what human rights groups have deemed an extrajudicial killing. Yusuf’s execution was video-taped by soldiers and later broadcast on television. The death of the leader and founder, Mohammed Yusuf, marked an initial turning point for BH and forced the group underground. Many of its leaders reportedly fled to other parts of Nigeria, including Bauchi State, as well as to countries throughout Africa. Other prominent members of the group include Abul Qaqa and Abu Zaid. Both Qaqa and Zaid have been acting as the group’s spokesmen. However, the group re-emerged with another leader, Imam Abubakar Shekau, in 2010, radically more violently and determined to seek vengeance against the Nigerian State for the execution of Mohammed Yusuf. The group was able to attract more than 280,000 members across northern Nigeria and from the neighbouring Chad and Niger (Agbiboa, 2013; Umar, 2011). Agbiboa (2013) records that BH’s membership comprises university lecturers, bankers, political elite, drug addicts, unemployed graduates, almajiris (homeless/abandoned northern Nigerian children) and migrants from neighbouring countries. The dominant members of the group are drawn primarily from the Kanuri tribe, located in the northeastern states of Nigeria, including Bauchi and Borno, which makes up roughly 4.0% of the Nigerian population, as well as from the Hausa-Fulani, 29.0% of the population, who are spread throughout most of the northern states (Agbiboa, 2013).

Since its re-emergence in 2010, the group has engaged in endless attacks on the Nigerian State. The group has taken responsibility for the consistent attacks on the northern part of Nigeria, including bombing institutions, shooting the innocent and kidnapping the unarmed. Hence, their activities have created fear in Nigerians, rendered thousands of people homeless and forced over 650,000 people to flee from the conflict zone to a comfort zone.

The traditional, electronic and social media in Nigeria have reacted by widely reporting their activities. This is where our interest lies in this study. How have the media represented BH terrorism in Nigeria? How have they represented the issues and news surrounding the activities of the BH?

Existing studies and problem statement

Existing studies on global terrorism have considered, among others, terrorism in relation to media, war, politics and fear (Altheide 2006, 2007, 2009; Hodges 2011). The non-linguistic studies on BH have been cultural and historical (Asogwa et al., 2012; Danjibo, 2012; Elkaim, 2013), religious and philosophical (Okemi, 2013; Shuriye et al., 2013), on communication and press freedom (Ekwueme and Obayi, 2012; Popoola, 2012), socio-economic, sociological and political (Aghedo and Osumah, 2012; Musa, 2012; Ogunrotifa, 2013). Therefore, a linguistic investigation of the discursive construction, which the present study tries to do, will elucidate what philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and others have done on BH.

On the other hand, existing linguistic studies on BH have only centred on aspects of pragmatics (Chiluwa and Adegoke, 2013), lexis (Ogungbe and Alo, 2014), aspects of grammar and discourse (Aghedo, 2012; Ayoola and Olaosun, 2014; Yusha’u, 2012) and a few others. However, insufficient linguistic and discourse attention has been devoted to the media discursive construction of BH terrorism in Nigeria. Yet it is capable of revealing the media intents and providing clearer insights into the BH operations. This study, therefore, examines the linguistic and discourse strategies deployed by the electronic newspaper (e-newspaper) reporters in constructing and representing the BH. The study answers the following questions: What agenda did the newspapers set? How are BH members represented by the media? What are the implications of the representations?

Methodology

For data, four e-newspapers from the northern (Daily Trust and Leadership Nigeria) and southern (The Punch and The Nation) parts of Nigeria are purposively selected; their printed versions are widely circulated across Nigeria, while the electronic versions are available online. The papers equally allocate sufficient space to reports on the activities of BH insurgency. Headline and overline stories are purposively sampled from the newspapers between 2011 and 2014. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) (with bias for Van Leeuwen’s version in the representation of social actors) and the transitivity aspect of systemic functional grammar (SFG) mainly guide the analysis. The next section examines the theoretic perspectives.

Theoretic orientation

According to Scheufele and Tewksbury (2007), the media tend to control what the audience believes by the manner in which they represent a news item. This study is interested in the different representational strategies by which the media set the agenda in labelling the BH group. To achieve this, the transitivity aspect of Halliday’s SFG and Van Leeuwen’s version of CDA are deployed in the analysis. Both theories provide a systematic explanation for the representation of BH as insurgents, militants, among others.

Given the particular deployment of different transitivity processes in the media constructions of BH, Halliday’s SFG, a formidable theory in discovering hidden projections, becomes very useful. The SFG is a functional semantic approach to language, which explores how people use language in different contexts and how language is structured for use as a semiotic system (Eggins, 2004: 20–21). In a transitivity analysis, Halliday (1994) sees the ideational function of the clause as meaning ‘representation’ (p. 101), that is, it is realised at the level of the clause as representation. The grammar of the clause consists of three elements of the process: the process itself (realised by a verbal group), participants in the process and circumstances associated with the process. The types of process are material, verbal, mental, relational, behavioural and existential (Halliday, 1994: 107–138). The central participant in material processes – ‘the one that does the deed’ (p. 109) – is called an Actor, and the second (optional) participant is a Goal. Therefore, aspects of transitivity processes deployed by the media will be identified in the course of our analysis in order to account for the linguistic and discourse features of the texts which bring about the derived representational strategies. In addition, at the level of the representations, we borrow from Halliday’s idea that grammar shades into lexis. We are therefore interested in how the use of a particular lexical item, in a news story, derives an implied representation. For instance, the use of the lexical item ‘kill’ suggests that the one who carries out the action is a ‘killer’, also for bomb/bomber, shoot/shooter and so on.

CDA is ‘a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Van Dijk, 2003: 353). It draws on many of the methodological tools of more traditional fields such as critical linguistics, text linguistics, sociolinguistics and the Hallidayan SFG. For our purpose in this study, we are interested in Van Leeuwen’s contribution to CDA because of its focus on the representation of social actors and actions in discourses. Since the various constructions in the media report different ways of representing the social actors that surround the reported reality and their social action, Van Leeuwen’s (2008) inventory in the representation of social actors is relevant in unveiling the ideological tendencies and representations. Van Leeuwen’s theory discusses how social actors can be defined and/or described in terms of the roles assigned to them either by reality or as represented in the given text. The relevant aspects out of the 10 categories and other sub-categories identified by Van Leeuwen (2008) are discussed in the following.

Exclusion refers to how social actors are either completely left out of a text or become de-emphasised. The two major divisions/types of exclusion are backgrounding, realised through ‘simple ellipses in non-finite clauses with -ing and -ed participles, in infinitival clauses with to, and in paratactic clauses’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 30) and suppression, realised through passive agent deletion, non-finite clauses functioning as a grammatical participant, beneficiary deletion, nominalisations, and process nouns and adjectives. While exclusion in backgrounding is less radical, it is more radical in suppressing.

Role allocation is where social actors are represented through the roles they play. Van Leeuwen’s idea here borrows largely from Halliday’s SFG; it concerns the assignment of roles to social actors through grammatical activation, that is, represented as dynamic forces in a given activity, and passivation, that is, described as undergoing a given activity. Social actors can be represented as ‘agent’ (‘actor’), sayer, senser, behaver and assigner. Passivation can occur as subjected, that is, social actors who are treated as objects beneficialised, in other words the third party in a discourse which benefits from it.

Genericisation and specification represent social actors as classes of people or as specific individuals that can be easily identified. Assimilation represents social actors as individuals (individualisation) or as a group (assimilation). Two kinds of assimilation are collectivisation and aggregation. While aggregation represents social actors with statistics by quantifying group of participants, collectivisation uses generalised opinions, not statistically presented; it is not presented in percentages, surveys or number(s). Association and dissociation represent social actors as groups. In association, different collective groups are associated with each other due to one common interest, while in dissociation an initial association gets broken. These groups may associate and dissociate themselves within the same text. Indetermination is where social actors are represented as unspecified, groups or individuals: the identity of the group is anonymous. Determination is where the identity of social actors is specified. In differentiation, social actors or social groups differentiate explicitly between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

Nomination identifies individuals ‘in terms of their unique identity’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 52). On the other hand, categorisation identifies individuals ‘in terms of identities and functions they share with others’. In functionalisation, social actors are described in terms of the activity or something they do: ‘an occupation or role’ (Van Leeuwen, 2008: 42); identification occurs where social actors are defined in terms of what they are permanently.

BH as insurgents/terrorists

The newspapers’ reports represent BH as insurgents – fighting against the government, using force and violence in order to be in control, as exemplified in texts 1 and 2:

Text 1:

As the terrorists continue to kill and maim, as happened in Tuba, Mafa LGA, also in Borno State, during the same period when the insurgents killed four people who were reportedly assisting the military with information … (The Punch, 2 February 2014)

Text 2:

The group rose to international prominence in 2010 and 2011 when it carried out a series of deadly attacks against the Nigerian government and detonated a car bomb after crashing into a United Nations building in Abuja, the capital. The gunmen in Sunday’s attack are reported to have killed dozens of students as they slept and rounded up others for execution. Several more students were injured trying to flee. (The Nation, 3 October 2013)

The attempt to take over forced the BH to combat the government’s protection house – the security personnel (army and police).

In text 1 and many other texts in this paper, the reporters use the word ‘terrorists’ as association to denote ‘them’ – a group of people who are united and associated in their resolve, against ‘us’ – the government and people of Nigeria. The Punch reporter implicated the BH group as insurgents, foregrounding their actions and activating their roles. The reporter activates BH as the active dynamic forces behind the action of killing, thus ‘the insurgents killed four people’, while the four people are passivated as the recipients of the killing. The use of the verb ‘continue’ in the report presupposes an antecedent and a continuation. The use of the adverb ‘reportedly’ distances the reporter from the source of the other information. The report specifies and identifies BH as insurgents. In text 2, The Nation reporter uses the discourse strategy of indicting, to represent the group as insurgents who have carried out series of deadly attacks on the Nigerian government. The lexicalisation of the report with words, such as, ‘gunmen’, ‘execution’, ‘deadly attacks’ and ‘killed dozens’ belonging to the semantic field of violence substantiates the representation of the group as insurgents. In addition, the report reveals BH as the perpetrators who had carried out series of deadly attacks through nominalisation and activation of ‘The group’, involved in the act of rising to prominence. The reporter further uses circumstance – ‘when it carried out a series of deadly attacks against’ – to foreground what led to the group’s prominence. The construction ‘The Nigerian government’ is individualised to bring out how massively the group has been able to attack the leadership of President Jonathan. Meanwhile, the reporter detaches himself from the report in the second sentence so as not to be held responsible as the source, using the sayer deletion, thus: ‘The gunmen in Sunday’s attack are reported to have killed dozens of students as they slept.’ The reporter uses exclusion strategy to suppress the source of his information, as practised when reporters do not really have newsworthy sources to attribute their information to or when they do not wish to disclose the identity of their source.

BH as militants

Militants are persons willing to use strong or violent action in order to achieve political or social change. The newspapers construct the members of BH as militants:

Text 3:

The Boko Haram terrorist group has at its disposal a seemingly limitless amount of heavy weaponry, vehicles, bombs and ammunition that it uses to kill with unfathomable wantonness. The Islamic militants, masquerading as members of the military, raided three villages in north-eastern Nigeria this week and killed 400 villagers ‘from house to house’ using ‘sophisticated weapons’, one local leader told Bloomberg. (The Nation, 10 June 2014)

Text 4:

The militants stormed a secondary school in Chibok, Borno state on April 14 and seized 276 girls who were taking exams. Some have managed to escape, but about 200 remain missing. (Daily Trust, 15 May 2014)

Text 5:

When he visited Saint Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, where more than 44 people were killed by the militant group, Jonathan was almost moved to tears. (The Punch, 16 January 2012)

The reporter in text 3 describes them as using very heavy weaponry to kill over 400 villagers; text 4 describes where they were camping, and the army was trying to strike back at them, having wasted so many lives; text 5 describes how the militants went to Saint Theresa Catholic Church, Madalla, and killed more than 44 people. All of the actions of the group described here are violent. Different discourse strategies are deployed to represent the group as militants. In text 3, The Nation reporter detaches himself from taking responsibility for the report by managing the voice of a villager, using the verbal process (Halliday, 2004) in authenticating claims about the villages raided, the number of villagers killed and the kind of weapons used in killing them. When the name of the group is mentioned as ‘the Boko Haram terrorist group’ in text 3 and many others in the samples, the reporters, in Van Leeuwen’s classifications, use determination to specify the identity of the group of militants. The reporter also identified the sophisticated weapons used in causing violence for the group’s desired change to include ‘vehicles, bombs and ammunition’. The reporters also used the strategy of appealing to the emotions of Nigerians and the world at large with the expression, ‘that it uses to kill with unfathomable wantonness’ (The Nation), and ‘Jonathan was almost moved to tears’ (The Punch).

In text 4, the Daily Trust reporter uses ‘the militants’, which is associated to form a group who perpetrated the act of storming, while the reporter uses the classification identification ‘girl’ to make reference to the victims of the action, who are equally assigned the role of clients, the goal of the action. The emotional appeal is further demanded in the use of the word ‘girl’ to show the fragility of the victims. The reporter lexicalises the description of the militants with the use of scary words such as ‘stormed’ and ‘seized’. The description by the Daily Trust reporter shows the discourse of condemning the act. He also attributes agency to the militants and recipients to the 276 girls who underwent the seizure. Appealing to emotions of readers, the reporter further includes that the victims of the seizure are actually taking examinations, while the reporter in text 5 uses a categorisation strategy, formal nomination, to represent ‘Jonathan’ and how he was almost moved to tears at Saint Theresa Catholic Church. As represented by the reporters, militants violently pursue their set goals.

3. BH as attackers

The newspapers construct BH as attackers – individuals who deliberately use violence on another or others, as exemplified in texts 6 and 7:

Text 6:

Since that mortal attack on January 14, Boko Haram terrorists have carried out other dastardly attacks. A few days after the Maiduguri bombing, the insurgents laid siege to Gashigar … killed 15 people and torched houses. Similarly, the mass murderers descended on Alau Ngawo Fatie … killing 18 innocent people. ‘They [Boko Haram] were in the village operating for nearly two hours without any security personnel coming to the aid of the villagers’, Bulama Alau, the village head, said. The senseless killings continued on January 21 and 22 when the insurgents attacked some satellite villages near Maiduguri. At least 18 people were killed in the attacks on villages like Kaya, Mude, Njaba and Kwaljiri. (The Punch, 2 February 2014)

Text 7:

Boko Haram militants have since infiltrated nearby towns, with little resistance from the army. In a well-planned attack on 7 May 2013 in Bama, some 70km (44 miles) from Maiduguri, about 200 heavily armed men stormed a military barracks, police station and government buildings. Fifty-five people were killed and 105 prisoners were freed in the raids. Significantly, the militants launched the attack in armoured vehicles mounted with machine guns. (The Nation, 16 May 2013)

In text 6, The Punch uses ‘Boko Haram terrorists’, ‘the insurgents’, ‘the mass murderers’, which all refer to the members of the group and represent, determine and specify the social actors as attackers, militants, insurgents and murderers. Meanwhile, the use of functionalisation comes to the fore in the expressions ‘the insurgents’, ‘the mass murderers’, to show the evil in their illegal role, occupation and activity. The reporter also manages the voice of the eyewitness, using the verbal process, to support and authenticate claim. The paper uses direct quotation, with inverted commas to separate the actual voice of the eyewitness from the reporter’s. Nevertheless, the reporter lends his voice to the direct condemnation of the attack. This is lexicalised with the use of expressions such as dastardly attacks, mass murderer and senseless killings, all of which can be assigned to the semantic fields of attack and violence and intended to condemn the group members. The Punch reporter also activates BH as agents of the attacks carried out, while he passivates the actual recipients of the attacks, the number of those killed in the attack, when they were killed and where they were killed. Meanwhile, BH is activated as the agent of the attack.

In text 7, The Nation also represents the BH as attackers using narrative strategy to describe the act carried out. Unlike The Punch, there is no external voice – eyewitness – to support the claims here. Nevertheless, the report activates the BH members as those who unleashed the attack on the police station and the prison, and gave the number of those who benefitted from the attack, for instance, 105 prisoners who were freed. It also gave the number of the various people killed and the ammunition used in achieving their goal.

BH as religious fundamentalists

The newspapers also construct BH as religious fundamentalists (extremists who follow religious laws very strictly, with a desire to make everyone believe what they believe) in texts 8–11. The term salafism has to do with a school of Sunni Islam that condemns theological innovation and advocates strict adherence to Sharia:

Text 8:

The salafist extremists have slaughtered about 1,500 innocent Nigerians and security agents, while about 7,000 people have died from the group’s onslaught since. (The Punch, 28 March 2014)

Text 9:

The Federal Government on Tuesday reacted to the offer of ceasefire by a faction of the fundamentalist Islamic group, Boko Haram, by giving a condition to the sect. (The Punch, 30 January 2013)

Text 10:

The United Kingdom government has taken a step further in the global fight against terrorism by placing a ban on two extremist groups – the UK-based Minbar Ansar-Deen and Nigeria-based radical sect Boko Haram. (Leadership, 9 July 2013)

Text 11:

The American president during his two days state visit to South Africa yesterday said … ‘we have more regional terrorist organisations like Boko Haram in Nigeria espousing an extremist ideology, showing no regard for human life’. (Daily Trust, 30 June 2013)

Representing the BH as religious or Islamic extremists means the group’s mission is to Islamise the Nigerian State, a Jihadist movement, so that all may follow after Islam. Mainly, all the papers describe them as extremists, while only The Punch used the word ‘fundamentalists’, alongside ‘extremists’. Nevertheless, all the representations describe the group as violent and unreasonable about its operation and subjecting Nigerians and others to pain. In text 8, there are many representations in the clause the salafist extremists have slaughtered about 1,500 innocent Nigerians and security agents’, in the framing of the group as fundamentalists.

First, ‘the salafist extremists’ is a cataphoric reference whose referent, BH, is backgrounded and can only be located when the reader progresses. While ‘the salafist extremists’ are assigned the role of an actor (‘agent’) in the material process of slaughtering, the reporter assigns the role of the goal (recipient/client) of the action to the ‘innocent Nigerians’, premodifying, with the use of aggregation, ‘about 1,500’ to portray the alarming number of Nigerians who have fallen victim to their extremism. To draw upon emotional appeal, the reporter modifies Nigerians in ‘innocent Nigerians’ to portray the innocence or guiltlessness of the victims. In addition, the use of collectivisation, ‘Nigerians’, signals the oneness and sameness of the victims of the attacks. Furthermore, the reporter gives a vivid description of the activities of the group in terms of the number of the people they have killed. The reporters further managed the voice of newsworthy world leaders from the US and the UK to condemn the group and their demands. The Daily Trust reporter in text 11 detaches himself from the description, but foregrounds the American president as the one who described the group as extremists. Likewise, in text 10 the Leadership reporter manages and introduces the voice of the UK government in directly condemning and openly banning the extremists from the UK. Meanwhile, it is only in The Punch reporter’s description in text 9 as ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘salafist extremists’ in text 8 that the use of the words collocates with the Islamic religion.

BH as killers/murderers

The lexical item ‘kill’ is used by the newspapers to represent BH as killers, as exemplified in texts 12 and 13:

Text 12:

Suspected members of the rebel sect Boko Haram stormed an agricultural college in Yobe, northeastern Nigeria, on Sunday, killing at least 40 in the latest of a string of attacks that have rocked northern Nigeria. (The Nation, 3 October 2013)

Text 13:

Headline: Boko Haram Kills 2,053 Civilians In 6 Months (HRW)

Overline: Human Rights Watch has described continuous killings of innocent civilians by the terrorist sect, Boko Haram as a crime against humanity, saying over 2,053 civilians in an estimated 95 attacks were killed in the first half of 2014. According to Corinne Dufka, West Africa director at Human Rights Watch, the figures are based on detailed analyses of media reports as well as field investigations. (Leadership, 16 July 2014)

In text 12, The Nation manages the indictment of BH by starting with ‘suspected’, to show that no person or group has taken responsibility for the killing yet. This is the discourse strategy of avoiding position-taking in order not to be held responsible for spreading false claim if it turns out not to be true. However, to support his suspicion, he indicts BH because the attack resembles the handiwork of the BH group. The use of the expression ‘the latest of a string of attacks that have rocked northern Nigeria’ implicates BH as the group that has been constantly unleashing series of attacks on the people and residents of northern Nigeria.

The headline in text 13 specifically identifies and activates BH as killers. The reporter assigns the role of agent to BH, while he assigns the role of client to the 2053 civilians. The use of collectivisation with the word ‘civilians’ signals an association of non-military Nigerians, dissociated from the members of the group in their oneness. In like manner, the reporter uses aggregation in the statistical representation of victims with the figure ‘2,053’ to foreground the number of people who have been killed by the BH. First, the Leadership reporter manages the voice of a newsworthy group. Second, the reporter detaches himself from the report by assigning the source of the figures to the human rights group. Third, the allocation of the source of information to a human rights group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), in the headline, authenticates claims about the alarming number of people (‘2,053’) whom BH have killed within a period of six months; therefore, BH are killers. The reporter goes further to evoke the voice of the human rights activist and mention the role of the voice behind the HRW, that is the director, in order to distance the claims from mere speculation. The identification of the sayer, ‘director’, relates to Van Leeuwen’s (2008) functionalisation wherein the role of the sayer is fronted. The mentioning of the figures, no doubt, as foregrounded in the headline, emotionally appeals to the public. The Leadership reporter foregrounds the figure of those already killed in the headline and uses tactics to appeal to the emotions of Nigerians.

BH as gunmen/shooters

Gunmen and shooters are criminals who use guns to scare people, kill people, deny people access to their asset or force them to do what they (the gunmen) want. This representation is evident in texts 14–15:

Text 14:

Dozens more Boko Haram members arrived at another village, Bargari … Once they had gathered, another ‘large number of terrorists’ arrived and ‘opened fire on the congregation’, one resident told Nigeria’s Daily Post. ‘The gunmen numbering 20 ambushed the village with four Toyota Hilux vehicles, AK-47 rifles, improvised explosive devices, and petrol bombs’, the paper said. (The Nation, 10 June 2014)

Text 15:

The gunmen in Sunday’s attack are reported to have killed dozens of students as they slept and rounded up others for execution. Several more students were injured trying to flee. (The Nation, 3 October 2013)

In text 14, The Nation reporter, twice, enumerates the number of the members of the group who stormed the village; the first set, almost unarmed, were in dozens, while the second set who were actually armed with guns were 20. He also identifies the village (Bargari) involved. The reporter manages an external voice – the voice of one of the villagers, to lexicalise the action involved when gunmen are in action: ‘opened fire on the congregation’ and ‘ambushed’. This representation also appeals to the emotions of the readers; a situation where gunmen just open fire, shooting unarmed members of the congregation, is pitiable. While he distances himself from taking responsibility for the report using ‘were reported to have’, The Nation reporter in text 15 uses functionalisation in the phrase ‘The gunmen’ to assign an unfriendly functional role, activity and/or occupation to the shooters. The reporter emotionally appeals to the readers by presenting the gunmen’s action thus: ‘reported to have killed dozens of students as they slept’, ‘rounded up others for execution’ and ‘several more students were injured trying to flee’. The reporter enumerates the number (‘dozens’) of the students who were killed in the attack, and states that several more were injured, while others were rounded up for execution.

BH as outlaws/criminals

All the papers frame BH as criminals – a group of people who engage in illegal activities which are wrongful and unacceptable by the societal standard or the laws of a land, and/or as people who have been proved guilty of a crime:

Text 16:

President Jonathan even stated that this criminal act of mass kidnapping of school girls is the beginning of the end of the armed insurgents … His words; ‘Boko Haram has launched a vicious guerrilla-style campaign against the government and people of Nigeria. It has attacked schools, slaughtered students in their dormitories, destroyed villages, communities and government infrastructure and has wreaked havoc on the economic and social life of our people’. (Leadership, 21 May 2014)

Text 17:

Rupert Colvile, the spokesperson for the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said this in a statement at the UN Headquarters in New York on Friday. He reiterated calls on Boko Haram and other extremist groups in Nigeria to cease their ‘cowardly attacks’ against civilians, members of government institutions, security forces and foreign nationals. ‘The High Commissioner noted that members of Boko Haram, if judged to have committed systematic attacks against a civilian population on grounds such as religion or ethnicity could be found guilty of crimes against humanity’. (Daily Trust, 18 May 2013)

Both the Leadership and Daily Trust reporters manage the voice of the president to nominate, activate and criminalise the activities of BH. President Jonathan’s voice is used to activate the agency of criminal acts carried out by the group. Some of the criminal activities as pointed out by the president and lexicalised by the Leadership reporter in text 17 in order to carry the expected weight include ‘mass kidnapping of schoolgirls’, ‘a vicious guerrilla-style campaign against the government and people of Nigeria’, ‘has attacked schools’, ‘slaughtered students in their dormitories’, ‘destroyed villages, communities and government infrastructure’ and ‘has wreaked havoc on the economic and social life of our people’. In text 17, the reporter uses the verbal process to formally nominate ‘President Jonathan’ as the sayer who condemned the ‘criminal act of mass kidnapping’. The assignment of sayer (verbal process) to external voices by reporters is technically termed attribution. The reporter therefore attributes his claim to the utterance of the president.

In text 19, the management of the voice of the United Nations (UN) officer Rupert Colvile is taken from the constitutional perspective. Using the verbal process of saying, the reporter attributes information source to Rupert Colvile’s voice in order to represent the standpoint of the UN High Commissioner where he outlawed the activities of the BH group with a threat of culpability and possibility of facing crimes against humanity. The High Commissioner, therefore, criminalises and/or proposes the criminalisation of the BH group’s actions based on, or if found guilty of, ‘attacks against civilians, members of government institutions, security forces and foreign nationals’ and ‘attacks against a civilian population’.

BH as abductors

Abduction, which is the use of force to take someone away against their wish, is one of the constructions used in representing the members of the BH group in the newspapers being considered:

Text 18:

The abduction of schoolgirls in Government Girls Secondary School (GGSS), Chibok, Borno State, has provoked world leaders to join forces with Nigeria in the quest to rescue the girls from Boko Haram terrorists. The world leaders including United States president Barack Obama, British prime minister David Cameron, France president Francis Hollande and United Nations (UN) secretary-general Ban Ki-moon have vowed to assist Nigeria in rescuing the schoolgirls. (Leadership, 9 May 2014)

Text 19:

(Leadership, 9 May 2014)

Text 20:

(The Nation, 10 June 2014)

Upon the abduction of secondary schoolgirls at Chibok in Borno State, different leaders and others across the world got provoked about the activities of the BH group. In text 20, the Leadership reporter begins with an explicit description and assignment of different roles to the participants in the kidnap issue. He nominalises and foregrounds the abduction matter to invite the readers’ attention. The activation and nominalisation of the action carried out against the Chibok girls is, therefore, the focused reason for the attention of the world leaders. The use of nominalisation ‘The abduction of schoolgirls’ foregrounds the abduction of the schoolgirls, thereby backgrounding the actors in the kidnap; nonetheless, the eventual use of prepositional circumstantial ‘from’ in ‘from Boko Haram terrorists’ activates the BH members as the agents that carried out the abduction. This ordering, where the reporter fronts the abduction, the action over the actors in the assignment of roles specifically appeals to the emotions of readers and the audience in general. The reporter further manages the voices of the world leaders by assigning them the role of the sayer in committing them to the rescue of the Chibok girls thus: ‘have vowed to assist Nigeria in rescuing the schoolgirls’.

In texts 21 and 22, the Leadership and The Nation reporters use pictorial representation to directly condemn, implicate and visually indict the group as kidnappers. The use of placards represents a subtle protest to the group and abductors to release or bring back the girls in their custody. Another one out of the placards in text 22 commands the members of the group to stop the act of kidnapping children. This sends a signal of antecedent of more than one kidnap. In text 21, the role of the sayer is assigned to the first lady of the US, Michelle Obama, who also supports the cry of Nigerians and uses the imperative mood to demand the group to return (‘bring back’) the abducted girls.

BH as political gangsters

Gangsters, otherwise thugs, are members of a violent group of criminals. Political gangsters, therefore, are members of a violent group of criminals used to achieve political gains, especially by politicians. This is exemplified in texts 25–27:

Text 21:

According to Jonathan who was overwhelmed with emotions, ‘Boko Haram started as a harmless group in Borno State. At that time they were used by politicians to fester their political interests. Now, they have grown cancerous and Nigeria, being the body, they want kill the body and nobody will allow it’. Some people are exploiting it to their own advantage, but terrorist attack on any part of the nation is an attack on all of us and all Nigerians will collectively fight this terror. (Daily Trust, 1 January 2012)

Text 22:

The Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, Lt. Gen Jeremiah Useni (rtd.), had led a team of Northern elders to a meeting with the President and Vice-President Namadi Sambo on Tuesday and told journalists afterwards that Sherrif used members of the sect as thugs during the governorship elections in Borno. (The Punch, 14 July 2011)

In text 25, the reporter unveils the origin of the BH group, yet detaches himself from the history by managing the voice of a newsworthy social actor, the president, whom he formally referenced by his surname, Jonathan. The same voice is also strategically positioned in unveiling how politicians had used members of the group as political gangsters ‘to fester their political interests’. The word ‘politicians’ here is an example of association, which is used to represent an associated group of people who had used the political gangsters. Using the president’s voice, therefore, the Daily Trust reporter activates BH as the agent who perpetrates violence thus: ‘have grown cancerous and Nigeria, being the body, they want kill’, and passivates ‘political interest’ as the benefit that politicians derive from them.

In text 26, The Punch reporter reveals, in full, the identity and actions of a Nigerian politician who had sponsored and used the group for political gains. In unveiling the identities and exposing it all, the reporter defines, in full, the identity of the leader of the delegation. He activates and nominates the chairman of the forum, ‘Lt. Gen Jeremiah Useni (rtd)’, as the agent who had led other members to the meeting and formalises the nomination by mentioning his title, ‘Lt. Gen’, and uses aggregation to statistically refer to the passivated ‘a team of northern elders’.

‘Sherrif’, a politician and former governor of Borno State, is activated as the agent who had used the passivated object, ‘members of the sect’ as political thugs. Since it is a sensitive report, the reporter detaches himself from the mention of Sherrif as a politician who had used members of the group as political gangsters; rather, he mentions the chairman of the forum as his source. Therefore, the actor’s name is not veiled, suppressed or backgrounded. To depict the roles of the different actors in the description, the reporter resorts to the use of functionalisation, with lexemes such as ‘chairman’, ‘president’ and ‘vice-president’. However, despite the fact that BH was not pointedly mentioned in the report, the use of ‘members of the sect’ reveals the use of exophoric reference.

BH as miscreants/evil perpetrators

Miscreants are persons who cause trouble, hurt people or behave in a dishonest, malicious or otherwise contemptible way. Texts 28–30 exemplify the representation of BH as miscreants or evil perpetrators:

Text 23:

The president was apparently reacting to insinuations in some quarters that the Christmas Day bombing that left dozens dead was a religious war against Christians in the country. He said government will fight Boko Haram, the ‘group of evil-minded people who want to cause anarchy to the end’, and called for a concerted effort by all well-meaning Nigerians to bring this problem under control. (Daily Trust, 31 December 2011)

Text 24:

Jonathan said how to mould and create a society that is conducive to the people to interact was more important than the physical infrastructure that is provided. He assured that ‘the challenge of Boko Haram will surely come to an end because everything about terror is evil’. (The Punch, 26 June 2014)

In texts 28 and 29, the Daily Trust and The Punch’s reporters, respectively, deploy the voice of the president, Goodluck Jonathan, to construct the BH as evil perpetrators, thereby labelling them as miscreants. While the reporters use functionalisation, ‘the president’, to identify Jonathan’s role, ‘Jonathan’ is formally nominated to disclose the unique identity of the president in question. The president’s expressions ‘group of evil-minded people who want to cause anarchy to the end’ and ‘the challenge of BH will surely come to an end because everything about terror is evil’ do not only appeal to readers’ emotions in the pitiable situation that Nigeria has found herself in; it also suggests a great threat to the country, especially since the president does not have a direct answer to the problem. His lexical choices (futuristic) in the following constructions – ‘who want to’, ‘will surely come to an end’ – portray a difficult situation already created by miscreants, without an end in view. In the first sentence in text 28, the reporter uses indetermination ‘some quarters’ as a tool to cover up his ignorance of the quarters, hide the identity of the quarters or treat it as irrelevant to the readers.

BH as bombers

The BH group use explosive devices, to terrorise the people. Texts 31–33 associate the group with bombing:

Text 25:

More than anything else, Monday’s early morning bomb blast at Nyanya, a satellite settlement in the neighbourhood of Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, bears an important message for the authorities that no part of the country can claim to be safe from Boko Haram’s campaign of terror. (The Punch, 16 April 2014)

Text 26:

The federal government yesterday decried the increasing spate of bombings in the Northern part of the country, saying the senseless attacks by the Boko Haram sect was becoming worse because state governors in the region were not doing enough to end the attacks. (Leadership, 22 May 2014)

Text 27:

Despite the poverty of northern Nigeria – where 70 per cent of people live on less than 60p a day – the Boko Haram terrorist group has at its disposal a seemingly limitless amount of heavy weaponry, vehicles, bombs and ammunition that it uses to kill with unfathomable wantonness. (The Nation, 10 June 2014)

The selected newspapers represent the BH as bombers. The destructive dividends of bomb explosion have been greatly felt in Nigeria. The group has used bombs and claimed responsibility in churches, the UN office at Abuja, motor parks, schools, police stations and other places in Nigeria.

The reporter in text 32 manages the voice of the president, thereby detaching himself, to condemn the BH group as bombers. Meanwhile, the reporters in texts 31 and 33 label, openly condemn, indict and identify the BH group as bombers. The purpose of detonating bombs is mainly to kill, and in some situations, to scare. The reporter in text 33, therefore, uses the specifying discourse strategy to identify and foreground the end result of the bomb and other weaponry used by the group thus: ‘a seemingly limitless amount of heavy weaponry, vehicles, bombs and ammunition that it uses to kill with unfathomable wantonness’. This equally appeals to the emotions of the readers; it creates fear, especially since there seems not to be an end in sight to the bombings.

BH as al-Qaeda affiliates

The selected newspapers represent BH as an affiliate of the popular al-Qaeda terrorist organisation, as exemplified in texts 35–37:

Text 28:

… an end to the Boko Haram insurgency. The group … has since affiliated with global terrorist bodies such as al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, al-Shabaab of Somalia and Ansaru of the Sahel. The terror group has killed about 5,000 people since its terror campaign began in 2009. (The Punch, 22 July 2013)

Text 29:

The insurgency, led by Boko Haram, has killed some 2,000 people since 2009 … there is growing concern that Boko Haram is receiving backing from al-Qaeda-linked militants in other countries. (The Nation, 16 May 2013)

Text 30:

Since 2009, Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, Nigeria’s Islamist insurgency popularly known as Boko Haram, has waged a violent campaign against the government to impose its authority under Sharia (Islamic) law. (Leadership, 16 July 2014)

BH, as an affiliate of the al-Qaeda group, demonstrates affinity with them in cognition and operations. The newspapers used different discourse strategies such as direct condemnation, unshielded identification and labelling. In the three texts, there was no introduction of outside voices to authenticate claims; the reporters openly identified and represented the BH as affiliates of other Islamic fundamentalist terror groups using names and expressions such as ‘al-Qaeda-linked militants in other countries’, ‘al-Qaeda in the Maghreb’, ‘al-Shabaab of Somalia’, ‘Ansaru of the Sahel’ and ‘Sharia (Islamic) law’. The descriptions in texts 35 and 36 are so apt in labelling BH as descendants of the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation. The reporters go further to identifying and enumerating the number (5000, 2000) of Nigerians already killed by BH since 2009, which is a common phenomenon with the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation. This is also a terrorist group which killed many people in the 11 September 2001 attack on the US. Meanwhile, text 37 only foregrounds the issue of the Sharia law in affiliating the BH group to the global terrorist group al-Qaeda.

13. BH as wasters/damagers

The newspapers (texts 38–40) equally represent the BH as wasters and damagers:

Text 31:

Adamawa is one of the three states where the terrorists have been killing, maiming and destroying life and property. The other two states are Borno and Yobe. (Leadership, 8 October 2014)

Text 32:

If anyone had doubted Boko Haram’s capacity for blood-curdling carnage, … bombings in the northern city of Kano that have so far claimed more than 200 lives and destroyed property worth billions of naira. (The Punch, 25 January 2012)

Text 33:

In spilling the blood of innocent persons no place had been spared. (The Punch, 31 August 2012)

Both texts 38 and 39 label and specify the BH as the perpetrators of the destruction, and identify the actions they have carried out through the use of the following lexical items and expressions: ‘killing’, ‘maiming’, ‘destroying life and property’, ‘coordinated bombings’, ‘claimed more than 200 lives and destroyed property worth billions of naira’. These expressions appeal to the emotions of the readers aroused by the evil being perpetrated by the group. Both reporters also specified and named the states that were affected by the destruction. While the Leadership reporter identifies three states, namely Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, The Punch reporter identifies ‘the northern city of Kano’. Therefore, members of BH are damagers of property, wasters of life and blood-letters/spillers.