RESOURCE ENTITLEMENT PERSPECTIVES, CONTEXT AND IDEOLOGY IN ONLINE NEWS REPORTS ON HERDSMEN-FARMERS CONFLICT IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Entitlement, which typifies context-bound expression of individuals’ rights, power and privileges over environmental resources, constitutes a major theme in news reports on herdsmen-farmers conflict on Nigerian online newspapers. Extant studies on the conflict have largely focused on the sociopolitical dimensions, stance acts and discourse representations of the conflict in Nigerian online media and the question of entitlement. However, scant attention was paid to the pragmatically-grounded entitlement perspectives taken on the conflict of ownership and control. This study was, therefore, designed to investigate the perspectives of the resource entitlement conflict in Nigerian online news reports, with a view to determining the entitlement types and contexts, ideologies, pragmatic strategies and locutions. Marina Sbisa’s model of Speech Acts Theory, complemented by Akin Odebunmi’s harmonised model of context and Teun van Dijk’s Socio-cognitive Critical Discourse Analysis, was adopted as the framework. The descriptive design was employed. News reports published in 2015-2021 were purposively selected because of their heightened reportage of the entitlement resource conflict. The quota sampling technique was used to select 106 online news reports (66 from Premium Times (PT) and 40 from Sahara Reporters (SR)). The data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Three entitlement types, namely state, folk and group, were identified in the online news reports. State manifested concessional and non-concessional forms (PT); folk projected indigenous and non-indigenous categories (PT), while group presented occupational and ethnic subtypes (PT and SR). These entitlement types manifested in six contexts: political, social, legal, economic, sociocultural and cultural. State and folk occurred in legal context; group manifested in sociocultural and economic contexts; state was entrenched in political and social contexts, while folk was found in cultural context. These entitlements and contexts projected four ideologies: separatist, solidarist, egalitarianist and feudalist. Separatist was found in SR, solidarist and egalitarianist were presented in PT and SR, while feudalist was constructed in PT. Separatist was enacted through politicisation of agrarian context (PAC) and ethnicisation of occupational context (EOC). Solidarist was foregrounded by strategisation of topical news narratives (STNN), ethnicisation of occupational context (EOC) and religionisation of economic acts (REA). Egalitarianist was presented through STNN, PAC and EOC, while feudalist was created through commodification of territorial space (CTS). These strategies were projected by four locutions: potential consequence-indicative, self-defensive, conflict-indicative and peace-intended. Politicisation of agrarian context was marked by potential consequence-indicative and selfdefensive, while STNN was occasioned by conflict-indicative. Ethnicisation of occupational context was foregrounded by potential consequence-indicative, self-defensive and conflictindicative; while CTS was realised through potential consequence-indicative; and REA was constructed through potential consequence-indicative and peace-intended locutions. These entitlement discourses culminated in evocation of polarisation, ethnocentrism and security insights. Entitlement perspectives, enacted through pragmatic and ideological resources in Nigerian online newspapers, reveal that the herdsmen-farmers conflict thrives on ethnic, political and occupational drivers of national disintegration in the Nigerian space. Therefore, policy makers, educationists and national environmental conflict management agencies should consider these variegated entitlement perspectives in addressing the herdsmen-farmers resource conflict in Nigeria.