Who Spilled the Oil? Transitivity, Agency and the Politics of Environmental Representation in Nigeria’s Niger Delta

This study investigates how Nigerian newspapers linguistically construct oil spills and environmental degradation in the Niger Delta, using Halliday’s transitivity system and Ogungbemi’s (2016) Integrated Model of Ideological Representation in Discourse (IMIRD). While existing scholarship focuses on the ecological, economic, and health consequences of oil pollution, this research addresses a crucial gap: the discursive strategies through which institutions narrate, obscure, or legitimize environmental harm. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of twenty news reports from Daily Trust and Leadership, the study examines how material and relational processes encode agency, responsibility, and resistance. Findings reveal that passive constructions, agent deletion, and nominalization are frequently used to mask corporate and governmental culpability, framing pollution as inevitable or accidental rather than systemic. Relational processes often normalize underreporting and institutional silence, while material processes that foreground community responses are softened or fragmented to limit their rhetorical impact. The analysis also uncovers ideological patterns that present governments as neutral mediators rather than complicit actors, and oil spills as technical malfunctions rather than outcomes of extractive capitalism. Ultimately, this study highlights how language not only reflects environmental realities but actively shapes public understanding, accountability frameworks, and policy responses in Nigeria’s ongoing ecological crisis.