Digital citizenship in Nigeria: gender, politics and resistance on X

Ataguba, Ochega

Digital citizenship in Nigeria: gender, politics and resistance on X

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Centre for Film and Media Studies

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

This study investigates how citizenship and civic engagement were reimagined through the use of X (formerly Twitter) during Nigeria's 2023 national election season. Drawing on theories of digital citizenship and intersectionality, it examines how ten prominent hashtags were resignified as spaces of radicalised citizenship, enabling citizens to subvert, negotiate, and contest state power. The study adopts a natively digital methods approach, combining thirteen months of digital ethnography with reflexive thematic analysis of publicly available tweets. It explores how digital acts of calling, opening, and closing illustrate both the emancipatory and exclusionary dynamics of online civic participation and activism. Findings reveal that ordinary Nigerians used X to make rights claims, construct counter-hegemonic networks, and reconfigure citizenship from below, while also reproducing exclusionary discourses through disinformation, misogyny, and homophobia. Through these processes, citizen subjects strategically traversed the boundaries of obedience, submission and subversion to renegotiate their civic commitments and reclaim the political field. The study takes a substantive view of digital citizenship, not just as belonging, rights, duties, and contestation, but as an exercise of political subjectivity and an ongoing negotiation of belonging and resistance, especially in a social context where nondominant classes and everyday citizens were previously denied the communicative privileges to dissent. Ultimately, the study highlights how X is actively shaping, contesting and redefining citizenship, offering hope for a more expressive, visible and inclusive citizenship regime in Nigeria. It argues that more than ever, what constitutes digital citizenship on X in Nigeria now includes the enormous natively digital data produced by everyday citizens on social media who subvert hegemonic norms and cultures. The study contributes to Global South scholarship by showing how digital platforms simultaneously enable and constrain democratic participation, reshaping the terrain of political subjectivity in contemporary Nigeria.