Gunmen, Bandits and Ransom Demanders: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Study of the Construction of Abduction in the Nigerian Press

1 Introduction: Abduction in Nigeria

Abduction has recently become one of the regular signatures that characterize security challenges in Nigeria, thus generating a worrisome and disturbing trend in the country. Security challenges in Nigeria have been aggravated by Boko Haram terrorism in the north; kidnapping and militancy in the north and south; politically-motivated communal and herders’ wars everywhere in the country. Yet, the right to security is one of the fundamental human rights of the people in any given state, Nigeria inclusive: ‘the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of the government’ (Section 14 (2) (b) of the Nigerian Constitution 1999). The genesis of insecurity in Nigeria has been anchored to governmental lapses like unemployment, struggle for power, corrupt practices and bad governance (Ali 2013; Jega 2002), and this has led to the need by some to make ends meet at the detriment of the comfort of others. Hence, abduction for ransom and other reasons is one of the security threats bedevilling Nigeria.

Nigeria ranks among the highest kidnapping zones out of the countries in the world today. Abduction is used interchangeably with kidnap in this study. Abduction, in Nigeria, has become a threat to national security since 2014, and more precisely, since the outset of full democracy in 1999 (Tade, Ojedokun, and Aderinto 2019). Abduction in Nigeria has become a serious national security challenge. It adopts different forms and adopts force, violence, aggression, terror, coercion, intimidation and so forth. Kidnapping is “an engagement for economic survival, securing political and business advantage over rivals and co-competitors” (Osumah and Aghedo 2011: 227). It is the act of holding a person captive against their wish to use them for a purpose. Kidnapping is carried out by different groups and or individuals in different locations in Nigeria, including the bandits and terrorists of northern Nigerian extraction, militants and cultists in the Niger Delta or south-south region, ritual killers and others in the western and eastern parts. Hence, the motivation for abduction can be economic, political, ideological, strategic or ritualistic. Kidnap for economic purposes, that is, for ransom, has been the most prominent in Nigeria. It is often carefully planned, organised and carried out; it is also oriented towards individuals or influential people with economic relevance – prominent personalities and rich persons. It was estimated that between January 2011 and March 2020 in Nigeria, over $18 million has been paid as ransom. The April 14, 2014 kidnap of 276 Chibok girls, and the February 19, 2018 kidnap of 111 Dapchi schoolgirls in northern Nigeria were carried out by Boko Haram terrorists for ideological and strategic purposes. Some of the girls were freed after the terrorists had got some attention from the government. Other harmless school pupils and children have been kidnapped at different times. According to UNICEF 1,436 children were abducted in Nigeria between 2020 and 2022. Whereas militants, terrorists and insurgents use banditry to either bargain or raise funds for their operations, other criminal groups do so for ransom – to earn a living.

Abduction is more experienced in states and countries that experience unstable governance challenges (Phillips 2009, 2011) like Nigeria and some other African countries. This brings to the fore and tasks the state on the need to make employment opportunities available to its citizenry, provide more effective policing and create stricter deterrents to perpetrators. Significantly, Nigerian newspaper outlets have been playing a major role in relaying the security challenges, including abduction issues, to readers within and outside Nigeria. However, how have the newspaper outlets and news reports been reporting the security challenge in Nigeria? One thing that is certain about the reportage is that such reports make value judgments which goes a long way in influencing the readers. The media believe they are influencers and play influential roles on abduction and related security issues.

Nigerian newspapers, an arm of the Nigerian press, like other media outlets all over the world, report different types of issues in society. Such reports and how they are relayed reflect certain viewpoints and sentiments with major consequences for the readers. Hence, newspaper reports play a vital role in shaping issues in setting the boundaries of what is talked about and how it is talked about (Henry and Tator 2002). Since newspaper outlets hold this influential role on their readers, it means their position in curbing or spiralling war and violence cannot be underrated (Puddephat 2006). The way newspapers construct or represent reality, especially about security challenges in Nigeria is worthy of discourse investigation. Print media’s word choices carry the power that reflects the interests of those who speak or write (Fiske 1994; Fowler et al. 1979; Taiwo 2008); hence news reports are subjected to rigorous linguistic manipulation to suit the print medium’s ideological stance (Oyeleye and Osisanwo 2013). According to van Dijk (2006, p. 115), ‘ideologies are expressed and generally reproduced in the social practices of their members, and more particularly acquired, confirmed, changed and perpetuated through discourse’. Fairclough (1995a: 2) says media discourse is ‘a tool for social change.’ The media adopt language in constructing a relationship that ensures constant social interaction and takes advantage of the knowledge of the social, cultural, political, educational and historical relationship that exists among the people and the society as its major controlling factor. Members of a given group, therefore, have ideological positions which they try to sell to influence their readers or consumers through their representational patterns.

The notion of perspective from which an event is narrated is central to all forms of representation (Fludernik 1993). Fairclough (1995a) posits that the analysis of representation would account for structures of propositions and how the structures reflect ideology and power relations. An examination of discourse representation in news stories, therefore, portends to reveal the kind of word choices, grammatical choices, and structural choices that news reporters prefer over others since they possess the power of choice to shape readers’ perceptions and public opinion (Fairclough 1995a). The power to influence readers and the public gives easy access and control to the media to manipulate, perpetuate and sustain power dominance, inequality and racism (van Dijk 1991). Newspaper outlets compete with one another on the politics of representing reality, including the reality of security threats in Nigeria. This study, therefore, applies a corpus-assisted critical discourse approach to examine the selected newspaper representation of actors and actions that relate to the issue of abduction in Nigeria.

2 Extant Studies and Current Research Focus

Abduction cases, which have recently become very rampant in Nigeria because of security challenges, have gained scholarly attention and intervention from different fields, especially sociology and linguistics. The reviews carried out in this section focus on abduction cases and other security challenges. From the sociological slant, such studies on abduction in Nigeria have concentrated on factors underlying abduction (Osumah and Aghedo 2011), abduction and financial gain (Badiora 2015), kidnapping-for-ritual purposes (Oyewole 2016), causes, prevalence and possible control of kidnapping (Otu, Nnam, and Uduka 2018a, 2018b), strategies and the captives’ experiences in the den of kidnappers (Tade, Ojedokun, and Aderinto 2019) and so forth.

Previous Nigeria-based linguistic studies on abduction in Nigeria have only focused on the kidnapping and release of Chibok girls (Chiluwa and Ifukor 2015; Osisanwo 2017; Uwazuruike 2018). In particular, Chiluwa and Ifukor (2015) apply the appraisal framework and (critical) discourse analysis to examine the discursive features of the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign on Twitter and Facebook. The study examines the role of affective stance in the evaluation of social actors in the campaign discourse. The study discovers that the #BringBackOurGirls campaign exhibits a great deal of affect at the level of vocabulary to reflect mood, feelings and emotional language by the social actors involved. The study opines that most of the evaluations reflect negative valence, which is often typical of public reactions to (social) media reports of crisis, or national disasters. Similarly to Chiluwa and Ifukor (2015) and Osisanwo (2017) retrieves data from social media, focusing on Facebook and applies the stance and engagement strand of the appraisal framework to tease out the mood, feelings and attitudes of netizens, which were largely positive, on the news of the release of some of the abducted Chibok girls. The third and last linguistic study, Uwazuruike (2018) examines the news framing of the Chibok schoolgirls’ abduction using two newspapers: Vanguard and Daily Trust. The study identifies three frames about the abduction: mass abduction, terrorism and Islamic militancy, and government inaction. The study concludes with the argument that the coverage of the attack in the Nigerian media had elements of ethnic bias which potentially could polarise the country along ethnic and religious lines.

A common denominator in the three studies is the focus on the abduction of Chibok girls. While the first two rely on social media, the last one, like the current study, relies on Nigerian newspapers. However, abduction in Nigeria today has gone beyond Boko Haram as the sole source, and the abduction of the Chibok girls. There are different other individuals and groups now involved in the activity as reported by the media. Yet, linguistic attention has not been sufficiently focused on the reports and the victims. A linguistic examination of the abduction reportage can reveal much more and assist security agencies in their quest to halt the kidnapping spree in Nigeria.

With the prevalence of abduction of humans beyond the Chibok girls within the Nigeria polity, there is a need for more linguistic examination of news reports on abduction and newspaper representation of social actors associated with abduction in Nigeria to reveal other linguistic dimensions to assist the state in preventing, controlling and curtailing the widespread of same. The way newspapers construct or represent reality, especially about abduction, abductors, the state and abductees in Nigeria is worthy of discourse investigation. Applying corpus linguistics and critical discourse analytical methods to investigate the representation of actors and actions that relate to the issue of abduction in Nigeria within the Nigerian press, published from 2020 to 2022, to reveal the media’s role in sustaining or curbing the security challenge, this paper:

1. identifies the keywords that define the focus of the abduction corpus;

2. classifies the various constructions emanating from the keywords;

3. categorises the contextual issues and the linguistic affordances that account for actors’ roles in the reports;

4. uncovers the linguistic pointers to and the dominant abduction strategies,

5. discusses the dominant discourse strategies that motivated the representations of social actors.

6. examines the implications of newspaper representations for security in Nigeria.

3 Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Studies and News Discourse

For the purpose of this study, ‘discourse’ is conceived as language use in different types of social situations (Fairclough 1992), for instance, news discourse. Corpus linguistics offers methods for analysing linguistic patterns in naturally occurring language, or ‘corpora’ (Brookes and McEnery 2020). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical approach which studies how ‘social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context’ (Fairclough 2015; van Dijk 2015, p. 466).

Discourse analysts have disagreed on the most reliable methodologies to apply in discourse studies. While some believe a qualitative-based critical content analysis is sufficient, others feel a quantitative-based corpus linguistics is sufficient. The widely-used qualitative method of analysis in critical discourse studies has been criticized for the possibility that data or linguistic features may be selected purposively or intentionally to prove a preconceived point (Koller and Mautner 2004; Wang and Ma 2020; Widdowson 2004). Hence, discourse analysts are beginning to embrace the ‘bottom-up’ corpus-driven approach which facilitates the use of analytic tools of corpus linguistics to process a large body of electronically-coded text, thus bringing about more dependable outcomes, including statistically-calculated frequency patterns (Baker et al. 2008) and keywords (Love and Baker 2015). Nonetheless, a strictly quantitative-based – corpus-driven approach has also been criticised for possessing the tendency to mislead since frequency patterns may be scattered, and findings may appear illogical.

For this paper, a corpus-assisted discourse study which combines the quantitative and qualitative analyses is favoured. Whereas the quantitative analysis focuses on the ensuing linguistic patterns, the qualitative analysis engages and interprets the ensuing patterns in co-text. A combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis offers a beneficial methodological synergy that provides more insights into representation patterns of actors, for instance, abduction actors, in the news. The combination can be very beneficial, with each method able to resolve some of the limitations of the other (Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013; Brookes and Baker 2021). With corpus assistance, CDA can effectively deal with larger and more representative datasets, commencing from a more objective point, like frequency or statistical salience (Brookes and Chałupnik 2022), and this applies to all discourse texts including news. Therefore, this paper analyses both what the selected newspapers write about abduction in Nigeria (CL), and the analysis of how and why they write about the abduction issue in Nigeria (CDA).

The term ‘construction’ is used in this study interchangeably with representation. Representation is an essential part of ‘the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture.’ (Hall 1997, p. 61). It involves the use of language to produce, denote or explain events in the world. In media reports, language is also used to produce and explain newsworthy events. As explained by Fairclough (2015), such representations of social groups, actions or activities, like abduction acts, reflect but can also shape societal views of those groups or issues. The representations of news media are often characterized by subtle and not-so-subtle abuses of power (Van Dijk 1988). Hence, Fairclough (1995b) submits that discursive constructions of the ‘reality’ of social actions, social relations, and social identities found in news discourse are strongly influenced by ideology, representing one-sided perspectives supported by the personal convictions, opinions, attitudes, and evaluations shared by a specific community (Reisigl and Wodak 2009, p. 88).

Studies of (print) media representations of social issues that have threatened the peace of Nigeria and Nigerians report a predominance of negative depictions of the perpetrators of terrorism (Chiluwa and Odebunmi 2016; Osisanwo 2016, 2024), conflict, protest and agitations (Igwebuike 2020; Osisanwo and Iyoha 2020) and so forth. The current study aims to provide a discourse analysis of abduction construction in news reports, to provide new insight into how representations of abduction matter are linguistically/discursively realized.

4 Data, Methodology and Theory

The study adopted both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods. Data were subjected to corpus (aided by SketchEngine) and critical discourse analyses (CDA) with insights from Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) discourse approach. The study retrieved and engaged a corpus of mini-specialised plain corpus of 152,365 words, labelled Nigerian Newspaper Corpus (NNC). The NNC is complemented by a reference corpus – International Corpus of English, Nigeria (ICE-Nigeria), a one-million-word multi-genre corpus of written and spoken Nigerian English for linguistic research. The 152,365 words corpus was retrieved from different online reports of four popular and most widely read English-medium Nigerian national newspapers, namely, Daily Trust, Leadership Nigeria, Punch and The Nation whose ownership is private and spread across the Kaduna-Abuja axis and the Lagos-Ibadan axis in Nigeria. The data is retrieved from the news reports section of the selected newspapers, and constituted by abduction reports within the period between 2020 and 2022 – a period of intense diverse security challenges, including abductions of old and young in Nigeria.

For the corpus, the topics which accentuate the research focus, and the time frame of the study (2020–2022) were combed, using the Google search engine with the topics: abduction/abductor in Nigeria, kidnap/kidnapping/kidnapper in Nigeria. Fifty-three articles from each of the four newspapers were retrieved, copied and stored in a separately labelled file. The retrieved files were saved after they had been examined, and cleaned of all needless entries, including web links, reporters’ names, etc. The newspapers, their websites and other details are listed in Table 1.

For the quantitative analysis, SketchEngine proved very useful in tracking the occurrences of the keywords to track their keyness in the data. This tool compares the NNC corpora with those of ICE-Nigeria and identifies what is unique or typical. Keywords are individual words or tokens which appear more frequently in the focus corpus than the reference corpus. To understand how the collocates contributed to representations, I used the concordance view to examine all collocational patterns along with their wider co-text, focusing in particular on nomination and predication choices (Reisigl and Wodak 2001). The identified and extracted words, based on the frequency of usage, define the constructions around abduction in Nigerian newspapers. The SketchEngine keyword’s function is used to generate a keyword list which allows examining quantitatively the abduction dataset. Baker (2006) opines that keywords or wordlists mirror the content of a text, giving a general idea of the focus explored in the text. For space, only the first 50 keywords in the data set were obtained after crossing out the functional words. The keywords in Table 2 are ranked in terms of their keyness (or relative frequency focus) score.

Second, insights were drawn from Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) discourse approach to CDA for qualitative analysis. The approach comprises five primary discursive tools: Reference/Nomination, Predication, Perspectivization, Argumentation, Intensification and Mitigation. To analyse data and discuss both quantitatively and qualitatively, only the referential and predicational aspects are deployed to aid the identification of the constructions around abduction in Nigerian newspapers, and the ensuing power play in the reportage. The discourse approach is strengthened by its multiple methods that seek to tackle specific discourse problems, using its three-dimensional steps: identify specific contents and thematic foci of the report, investigate the discursive strategies, and examine the linguistic means through which the strategies are realised.

5 Analysis

Following Baker’s (2006) position that keywords mirror the content of a text, giving a general idea of the focus explored in the text, the keyness notion relates to the main focus or topics in a corpus. The keywords in Table 2 are ranked in terms of their keyness (or relative frequency focus) score. The first ten most frequently featured items and their relative frequency are kidnap (5,035.076), police (4,214.754), victim (3,847.024), kidnapper (3,479.294), ransom (2,376.103), gunman (1,951.799), kidnapping (1,782.077), abduct (1,697.217), bandit (1,527.495), Kaduna (1,414.347). The different keywords point to the direction of concentration in the representation of abduction within the Nigerian space. After generating the list of keywords (see Table 2), it was not shocking that the different words like ‘kidnap’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘kidnapping’, ‘abduct’, ‘abductor’, ‘abduction’ ‘abductee’ which directly associate with abduction were mostly ranked. Also on the keyword list are words which identify activities relating to abduction: ‘victim’, ‘ransom’, ‘gunman’, ‘bandit’, ‘ordeal’, ‘herdsmen’, ‘captivity’, ‘blindfold’, ‘gang’, ‘suspect’, ‘robber’, ‘trek’, ‘hostage’ and others. Different words are also deployed to indicate the locales of the activity: ‘Kaduna’, ‘Abuja’, ‘Nigeria’, ‘Lagos’, ‘FCT’, ‘Nasarawa’, ‘Kogi’, ‘Ondo’, ‘Zamfara’, ‘Kwara’ and ‘Kebbi.’ The different keywords point to the direction of concentration and dominance in the representation of abduction in the Nigerian space.

Keyword focus, therefore, revealed five constructions in relation to abduction in Nigeria. The five constructions are examined in the next subsection under the analytical categories: construction of abduction perpetrators; construction of the state; construction of abduction settings/scenarios/contexts; construction of abduction act as a means to an (economic, political) end; and construction of abduction victims.

5.1 Construction of Abduction Perpetrators

Following the high ranking of the words kidnapper (with a relative frequency of 3,479.294), gunman (with a relative frequency of 1,951.799), bandit (with a relative frequency of 1,527.495), suspect (with a relative frequency of 1,018.33), herdsmen (with a relative frequency of 537.4519), gang (with a relative frequency of 424.3041), armed (with a relative frequency of 792.0344), robber (with a relative frequency of 339.4433), Fulani (with a relative frequency of 311.1564) and others, as revealed in Table 2, the newspapers deployed referential/nomination strategies as referring expressions to construct abductors or abduction perpetrators in Nigeria typically. A referring expression, in linguistics, is any noun (phrase), whose function in discourse is to identify some individual objects. The nominal choices used as referring expressions to label or identify abductors or abduction perpetrators in Nigeria are ‘gunmen’, ‘bandits’, ‘Fulani herdsmen’, ‘(Boko Haram) terrorists’, ‘gang’, ‘armed robbers,’ and others. Different attempts have been made to identify and label the actual perpetrators of kidnapping in Nigeria. The foremost April 2014 kidnap of the Chibok girls was blamed on Boko Haram terrorists as they openly confirmed the same in different viral videos. However, since then there have been pockets of different and other coordinated abductions of groups of people and individuals across different parts of the country. Meanwhile, the concordances of abduct (Figure 1) and kidnap (Figure 2) show that the words ‘abduct’ and ‘kidnap’ co-occur with other words like gunmen, Fulani herdsmen, armed men, robbers, terrorists, and so on, to pointedly reinforce the identities of those labelled as abductors in the news reports.

Figure 1:

Concordance of ‘abduct’ in the corpus.

Figure 2:

Concordance of ‘kidnap’ in the corpus.

The most used referring term in the construction is ‘gunmen.’ A gunman is described as a man who uses a gun to commit a crime or terrorise. The labelling or description of abductors as gunmen has recently been used by the media and political class to cover up for the facelessness of individuals behind security challenges in Nigeria. Where the references have become established, news reporters deploy other referential/nomination features like deictics, anthroponyms, metaphors and toponyms for further description or references. The deictic reference they refers to gunmen in ‘The gunmen, numbering seven came around 9.30 pm …. They fired gunshots sporadically. As the people in the house came out, they were grabbed.’ (Punch, December 2, 2022). Besides, predication strategies are deployed to assign evaluative negative attributes to the abductors through the use of negative evaluative adjectives which position the reporters as co-sympathisers with the victims and distance them from the abduction perpetrators. For instance, the adjective armed with a relatively high frequency of 792.03 is a representative adjective that conveys a negative evaluative meaning used to describe the perpetrators in different reports. They are described as individuals who are armed with illegal firearms. They possess illegal firearms to scare, overpower and dispossess innocent citizens of their freedom and other possessions. The different choices converge in the negative construction of the perpetrators of abduction in Nigeria.

5.2 Construction of the State as Combatants, Weaklings, and Failures

The high ranking of the words police (with a relative frequency of 4,214.754), Buhari – the President of Nigeria (with a relative frequency of 509.165) and Abubakar – the Inspector General of Police in Nigeria (with a relative frequency of 509.165) is used by the selected newspapers to construct and describe the expected state posture in nipping the abduction issue in the bud. The word police ideally is expected to be associated with the anti-crime squad that readily combats any form of criminality. The reports deploy prediction strategies to both positively and negatively evaluate the state. In some instances, the Nigerian Police are evaluated positively as real combatants who occasionally rescue abductees from their abductors and at other times capture the abductors. However, the festering abduction in the country calls to question the competence of the combatants; hence, at other times, the reports evaluate them and the president negatively as weaklings and failures. The concordance of police (Figure 3) shows that the word co-occurs with other words to accord the Nigeria Police some positive evaluations as combatants, rescuers, solace providers to abduction victims, and abductor trailers. At other times, it accords them some negative evaluations where they are overpowered by kidnappers and had their riffles seized, and presented as kidnap victims in ‘the gunmen whisked away the police inspector after they asked him to surrender the gun.’ Thus, they are represented as weaklings and failures who lack the capacity for self-protection let alone protecting Nigerians. Referring expressions are also deployed in the description of the state. For instance, the deployment of Anthroponyms, with the mention of President Muhammadu Buhari, functions to call out the number one citizen who swore allegiance to the protection of lives and property; the deployment of same with the Inspector General of Police, Mohammed Abubakar Adamu calls to question his competence as the head of the police in safe-guarding the lives of the citizenry.

Figure 3:

Concordance of ‘police’ in the corpus.

6 Discussion and Conclusion

This study set out to investigate the representation of actors and actions that relate to the issue of abduction in Nigeria within the Nigerian press, using selected newspapers published between 2020 and 2022, in order to reveal media’s role in sustaining or curbing the security challenge. Applying corpus linguistics and critical discourse analytical methods to the data, the keyword focus revealed five constructions on abduction in Nigeria. The various constructions were embellished with the deployment of the referential/nomination strategy, using devices such as deictics, metaphors, verbs and nouns to denote processes and actions. Predication strategy was also deployed with devices such as evaluative attributes of negative or positive traits, to portray abduction (context), abductors, abductees and the state. Different referential/nomination and predication strategies are deployed to construct abduction in Nigeria and the issues surrounding it. Such constructions give a face or name to the perpetrators of abduction in the Nigerian special context, describe the activities of the state in combating abduction as a security challenge, identify the contextual conditions under which abduction is most observable, describe the purpose for which abduction is executed, and define the representations of abductees in relation to victimhood.

The identified strategies are deployed to construct the issue of abduction and the perpetrators of abduction in Nigeria. The identified constructions of abductors advance the frontiers of knowledge beyond the findings of linguistic studies (Chiluwa and Ifukor 2015; Osisanwo 2017; Uwazuruike 2018), which focus on Chibok girls and identify Chibok girls’ kidnappers as Boko Haram terrorists. Uwazuruike (2018), particularly, identifies three frames about abduction: mass abduction, terrorism and Islamic militancy, and government inaction. In essence, Uwazuruike (2018) associates abductions in Nigeria with terrorists, Islamic militants, and government inaction. However, beyond what Uwazuruike (2018) identified, the current study has identified the perpetrators of abduction in Nigeria to include gunmen, bandits, (BH)terrorists, Fulani-herdsmen, and so forth. The construction of the state (police, military, political heads and the Buhari-led administration) as combatants, weaklings, and failures is a serious challenge to the Nigerian government to wake up to her civic responsibility to protect the masses from devourers. Uwazuruike’s position on the government’s inaction in the 2018 study still prevails today as news reports describe the government as failing to safeguard the citizens in the face of abduction. Like Chiluwa and Ifukor (2015), the current study identifies negatives in the construction of both the abduction actors and the state. In agreement with other non-linguistic studies (Ali 2013; Jega 2002; Phillips 2009, 2011), the experiences of states and countries with unstable governance challenges like unemployment, struggle for power, corrupt practices and bad governance need to be obliterated. The construction of abductees as helpless and powerless victims betrayed by the (protective hands of the) state, and as a set of captives who undergo harrowing experiences agrees with Tade, Ojedokun, and Aderinto (2019) that kidnap victims experience hell in the hands of their captors. The construct of abduction as a means to an (economic, political) end with ransom collection is also apt. The quantitative analysis further reveals that abduction is carried out more for economic purposes than rituals. Meanwhile, this study disagrees with Oyewole (2016), who canvasses that abduction in Nigeria tilts more towards kidnapping-for-ritual purposes, but agrees more with Badiora (2015) that abduction is carried out in Nigeria for financial gain. Abduction for financial gain is a product of underemployment or no employment for many. This position calls out the state on the need to rethink the current stance on job creation.

The newspapers also construct abduction settings/scenarios/context by naming the specific parts of the country where abduction takes place or is prominent, identifying the contextual conditions under which abduction is most observable – number game, darkness as a supporter of evil perpetration, gunshots firing as a strategy to inflict fear on (potential) victims, veiled identity/scene as a strategy to retain dominance and power, bush path and hidden locales as space for atrocious acts and hostage-taking. The quantitative and qualitative aspects of this study show that Nigerian newspapers, through their choices, converge to construct abductors as a set of people who deny others freedom, kill/maim uncooperative abductees, and enforce the payment of ransom as a condition for the release of their captives. The various constructions reveal that the abductors are characterised by individuals who are militant, violent and economic usurpers. As pointed out earlier, the focus of a text portrays and reveals the newspaper’s opinion and evaluations of actions, events and practices, principally communicating their ideological pursuit about certain conditions. Hence, the discursive constructions of the ‘reality’ of social actions, social relations, and social identities (Fairclough 1995b) found in the abduction news discourse are strongly influenced by the ideological leanings of the Nigerian press, representing a one-sided perspective supported by the personal convictions, opinions, attitudes, and evaluations shared by a specific community (Reisigl and Wodak 2009, p. 88). The Nigerian press converged to negatively portray the abductors, characterise them with a criminal script, and attack the incompetence of the state in checkmating the abduction menace. The reports assign meaning which negatively evaluates and demonises abduction practices in Nigeria; thus successfully putting fear in the heart of the citizenry without fully offering the much-needed solution.

Although this study neither holds brief for abductors nor normalises the ‘trade’, however, it observes that not much is represented from the perspectives of the abductors, possibly because most of them are faceless. What are their needs and the reason for choosing the unfriendly and anti-people business path? The identification of abductors as gunmen, bandits, and terrorists still seems a faceless identity. More needs to be done to unveil and further deploy Anthroponyms in reporting the abduction perpetrators. On the other hand, the reports seem to be overtly silent about the need to uproot the root cause of abduction in Nigeria, which is unemployment (Ali 2013). This study therefore posits that the use of security apparatus to check abduction is not sufficient, if the state can address the employment conundrum in the country, and very fast, the commonest aspect of the intent behind kidnapping – economy (survival) – will be addressed immediately, and relative peace will be restored. In addition, the Nigerian press needs to further engage this slant to give appropriate (re)orientation, using the power of choice they possess to shape readers’ perceptions and public opinion (Fairclough 1995a), and demand what is appropriate from the state.