Social media, COVID-19 and visual articulation of public distrust in Nigeria

Being a landscape of widespread political distrust, Nigeria presents an intriguing context in the event of a pandemic. In addition to data from observation and informal interactions, we explore COVID-19-related photographs, videos, and memes, along with comments they generated on their online sites of circulation, employing critical ethnographic narrative approach to analyse them. This compels us to argue that public reluctance to submit to government control protocol against COVID-19 is a political act, performed in protest against perceived duplicity of state functionaries. We considered the framings and discourses deployed by state functionaries as a play on ideology constructed to decontextualise the patterns of public reaction, thereby sidestepping their (state officials’) own complicity. The paper concludes that the public credibility of state institutions and political leadership is a major intervening factor in any epidemic containment effort.