Tribal Concealment: A Nomenclatorial Analysis of Herdsmen Discourse in Nigeria Media

Abstract

Abstract
The Fulani herdsmen are nomad who settled in different locations throughout
the country peacefully. The peaceful coexistence between the Fulani herdsmen
and farmers/villagers have been tampered with in the recent time due to the
constant quarrel and attack between and among the sects. The attack is
somewhat monopolised by the Fulani herdsmen. This has make it look like a
Fulani herdsmen attack on their host.Playing their oversight role in the
society, the media is reporting the conflict between the sects and arrogating the
attack to the Fulani herdsmen. Tactically, media has dropped Fulani from the
phrase “Fulani herdsmen” and conceal the tribes’ name while reporting the
conflict. There are existing works on the study of herdsmen/farmers’ conflict in
the academic but there is none that studied tribal concealment in the discourse.
This work therefore considered this a huge vacuum that needs to be filled by
studied different strategies used to conceal Fulani as a tribe in the discourse
and examine the implication of such concealments. Data are collected from two
major Nigerian newspapers, the Vanguard and Punch newspapers. The work is
content based analysis. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is adopted as the
model and the work is analysed qualitatively. Concealment strategies like
lexical replacement, nominalization, passivisation, hedging, use of pronouns
and name dropping are identified. The work also discovered that the
concealment has social, political and academic implication.
Key words: Fulani, concealment, nomenclatorial, herdsmen discourse, media