Silencing Dissent: A Discourse-Historical Analysis of Government Statements During the #Endsars Movement

This study investigates how the Nigerian government used language to silence dissent during the #EndSARS movement by analyzing official statements through Ruth Wodak’s Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) and Robert Entman’s Framing Theory. The #EndSARS protests, driven by youth resistance to police brutality, generated a communicative battleground where state authorities attempted to delegitimize activists and redefine peaceful demonstrations as threats to national security. Government statements frequently labeled protesters as “misguided,” “violent,” or “externally influenced,” revealing discursive strategies rooted in Nigeria’s longstanding political culture of suppressing civic resistance. Using the DHA, the study situates these utterances within historical and institutional contexts, demonstrating how state rhetoric echoes earlier colonial and postcolonial patterns of portraying dissent as disorder. Framing Theory further exposes how the government strategically defined the protests as a national crisis, attributed blame to subversive actors, offered moral evaluations that positioned the state as a stabilizing force, and justified repressive interventions as necessary for public order. The study employed a qualitative design, analyzing twenty purposively selected government statements, press releases, and televised speeches between October 2020 and March 2021. Through thematic mapping, discursive strategy identification, and contextual interpretation, the findings reveal systematic delegitimation, moral panic construction, and narrative reframing aimed at weakening the legitimacy of youth protest. The research concludes that the government’s discourse during #EndSARS functioned as a linguistic mechanism of political control, reinforcing hegemonic authority while undermining democratic participation. The study contributes to scholarship on political communication, resistance, and state power by demonstrating how language becomes a subtle yet powerful tool for managing dissent in contemporary Nigeria