NJOMACS

The choice of Nigeria’s leader to eliminate the fuel financial aid on May 29, 2023, during his inaugural speech, has not gone down well with Nigerians. The oil subsidy removal has attracted negative comments from Nigerians across the social media platform. Among their grievance is that life has somewhat become more hopeless for them, they criticized the president for imposing an antisocial economic policy on the nation. There is a dearth of literature on the area of Twitter and Facebook netizens’ dialectics on oil subsidy elimination in Nigeria. This is the huge lacuna the academic work aims to fill. The study analysed X (Twitter) and Facebook netizens’ dialectics on fuel subsidy elimination in Nigeria. It attempts to ascertain the slants in which texts on subsidy removal issues were presented on Twitter (X) and Facebook. A content analysis research design was used. Data for the study were collected through posts, comments, and reactions on X and Facebook related to the issue. The researchers garnered the posts from the two platforms by searching for the keywords: “Fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria”, “Tinubu removes Petrol subsidy” and “#Subsidy is gone in Nigeria” which showed over three thousand posts/comments on the fuel subsidy removal case. The data collection period spanned from May 29, 2023, when President Tinubu removed the subsidy. In other words, the study covered a period of two months (May 29 to July 29, 2023). Since it is almost impossible to copy all texts published on Twitter (X) and Facebook within the scope of the study since social media contents are openly sent based on individuals perceived explanation of a given text, the scholars randomly selected 60 texts each from Twitter (X) and Facebook making the sample size 120. The researchers found that most of the message slants were negative, accounting for about 60.3%, with only a small percentage being neutral (13.3%) and 18.3% being positive. It was revealed that the major message sources were from members of the public. It was also found that the discourse on subsidy removal was characterised by a high percentage of unfriendly tones or languages both on Facebook and X (Twitter). The scholars affirm that the discussion on the oil subsidy removal issue was characterised by a negative sentiment as expressed by netzines in their messages. The netizens are against fuel subsidy elimination by Nigeria’s government. The researchers recommended that Netziens should continue to use the opportunities offered by social media platforms like Twitter (X) and Facebook to air their perspective on national issues.