College of Leadership and Development Studies
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Item ASSESSMENT OF CROSS BORDER ARMS TRAFFICKING IN NIGERIA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR REGIONAL SECURITY(Covenant University, Ota, 2026-06) OFFONG, Jeremiah Etuk; Covenant University, DissertationThe study assesses cross border arms trafficking in Nigeria and its implications for Regional Security. The illicit movement of arms across the borders is one serious challenge to Nigeria's national security, institutional integrity and sustainable developmental path. Even though Nigeria has an extensive regime of international, regional and national legal obligations on the issue of small arms and light weapons, such as the ECOWAS Convention on Small Arms and Light Weapons, the Arms Trade Treaty and the United Nations Programme of Action, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians have been killed and millions displaced by the insurgency, banditry, farmer-herder clashes and organised crime that continues to plague the country via its 4,047 km borders with Niger, Cameroon, Chad and Benin. To achieve the objective of this study, qualitative research design with descriptive trend analysis of secondary data were used in the study. Some secondary sources were analysed using systematic document analysis that was structured around SDG 16 indicators and organised into five categories: Arms seizure reports, Violence and conflict datasets, Border Security and governance assessments, Regional and international organisation reports, and peer-reviewed journal articles (2010 to 2025). The study findings showed that cross-border arms trafficking in Nigeria is a self-reinforcing structural governance problem, which requires concurrently integrated reforms in institutional integrity, border infrastructure, socio-economic development, regional security cooperation and technological modernisation. The study recommended that the government of Nigeria needs to make an urgent priority reform of institutional integrity in the border security agencies as a precondition for all other investments in counter-arms trafficking and concluded that Nigeria, ECOWAS and the international community need an integrated, simultaneous and structurally adequate response to the issue of arms trafficking on a global scale.Item A PRAGMA-SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL MEMES OF THE 2023 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NIGERIA(Covenant University, Ota, 2026-08) ADEWUMI, Adetola Theresa; Covenant University, DissertationIn modern online discourse, memes have emerged as a strategic tool for expressing and conveying opinions and ideologies on political, economic and socio-cultural events. They have been evidently important in shaping perception of the voting public in Nigeria especially during electoral processes. On this premise, this study examines political memes shared on social media platforms in Nigeria during the 2023 presidential election, as well as analyse their linguistic and visual components. The research seeks to identify pragmatic act and semiotic resources to realise varying interpretations embedded in the memes. The problem addressed is the need to understand how political memes are conveyed online through multimodal resources and the significance of the study lies in its contribution to pragma-semiotics and online political discourse. Using a qualitative method, twenty (20) memes sourced from different social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, YouTube and blogspots, were analysed using Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Act and Kress and van Leuween (2006) Visual Design Grammar theories as framework for the analysis. Findings reveals that meme authors employ contextual variables such as strong criticism, persuasion, comparisons, etc. enhanced by pragmemes like shared situational knowledge, reference and metaphor to create memes aimed at lampooning electoral systems. The study further displays the deployment of semiotic designs categories under representational, interactive and compositional modes to evaluate symbolisms, framing, salience, social distancing, colour, mood as tools for visual interpretations. Results also indicate strong influence of political ideologies, age differences, political and economic instability and previous records of manipulations in the electoral system as motivating factors for the creation of this memes. Overall, ideological views though subjective, are portrayed through the political memes as tools to creating awareness against underlying illegitimate practices in the Nigerian electoral system.