Discourse Strategies in Nigerian Political Manifestos: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of 2023 Presidential Election Documents

This study presents a multimodal critical discourse analysis of political manifestos produced by major presidential candidates in Nigeria's 2023 general election, investigating the discourse strategies through which candidates construct policy positions, project leadership credibility, and address diverse electoral constituencies. Political manifestos as texts have received increasing scholarly attention globally, but Nigerian manifesto discourse has been analytically marginal in the critical linguistics literature despite the significance of the documents in electoral competition. The study adopts a multimodal critical discourse analysis framework drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Kress and van Leeuwen's multimodal framework. Three manifestos published by leading candidates were subjected to systematic analysis across verbal, visual, and layout dimensions. The analysis examines macro-structures, lexical choice patterns, rhetorical appeals, modal configurations, and the discursive construction of national identity and economic vision. Findings reveal the consistent deployment of populist framing strategies, the selective mobilisation of Nigeria's developmental aspirations through high-modality visual representations of infrastructure projects, and significant differences in ideological positioning between the three candidates' documents. The study also documents the adaptation of manifesto discourse to digital distribution formats, including shortened social media derivatives. The research contributes to political discourse analysis in Nigerian democratic contexts and recommends critical political literacy education for Nigerian voters. Keywords: political manifestos, critical discourse analysis, multimodality, 2023 elections, presidential campaigns.