From pant to pixel: Memeotics and pantomime of governance

Words matter. Images matter even more. But in the accelerated republic of WhatsApp, Facebook, and TikTok, what ultimately governs perception is neither word nor image in isolation. It is velocity, i.e., the speed with which meaning is manufactured, circulated, and sedimented into public consciousness. In that velocity lies both the promise and peril of what we may call Memeotics – the semiotics of memes as instruments of interpretation, distortion, and, increasingly, political warfare. The recent viral claim that Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf allegedly distributed customised red women’s underwear bearing his photograph as empowerment or campaign material offers a compelling entry point into this evolving grammar of public discourse. At first encounter, the claim was not merely provocative and perverted; it was incendiary. In the cultural and religious ecology of Kano, such an act would represent a profound breach of propriety, dignity, and political judgment. Unsurprisingly, outrage travelled at the speed of outrage – fast, furious, and largely unverified.

However, as subsequent forensic investigations have demonstrated with remarkable clarity, the viral narrative was false. The Governor’s image, which was central to the scandal, was not part of the original footage. It was digitally superimposed, grafted onto plain red underwear in post-production with a level of sophistication that rendered the manipulation nearly invisible to the untrained eye. Frame-by-frame analysis using tools such as InVID revealed no trace of political branding in the original video. Error Level Analysis (ELA) exposed compression inconsistencies precisely in the regions where the Governor’s face appeared in doctored versions. AI-detection systems confirmed that while the base video was authentic, the altered iterations bore unmistakable signs of digital fabrication, with manipulation confidence levels approaching 98 percent. In short, what the public consumed as evidence was, in fact, an artefact, i.e., a constructed reality masquerading as documentation. But to stop at debunking the falsehood is to miss the deeper story. For the real question is not merely how the misinformation was created, but why it was so readily believed. Here, we must turn to the pre-existing conditions of Nigerian governance discourse.

Nigeria’s political landscape has, over time, cultivated a peculiar semiotic environment, one in which the boundaries between policy and performance, substance and symbolism, governance and spectacle have become increasingly porous. Citizens have witnessed, repeatedly, the transformation of “empowerment” into a theatre of distribution: wheelbarrows adorned with political insignia, shovels and head pans decorated with ceremonial ribbons, motorcycle tyres presented as constituency dividends. These acts, often staged with fanfare and documented for public consumption, have contributed to what may be termed the normalisation of the absurd. Within such a context, the viral underwear claim did not appear as an outlier; it appeared as an escalation. It fit seamlessly into an already familiar narrative, a narrative in which governance tinkers at the edges, substitutes tokens for transformation, and privileges optics over outcomes.

This is the paradox; the falsehood succeeded not because it was entirely implausible, but because it was contextually credible. Memeotics thrives in such environments. It feeds on existing narratives, amplifies latent suspicions, and packages them into visually compelling, easily shareable units. A meme does not need to be true; it only needs to be believable within the cognitive framework of its audience. In this sense, the doctored underwear images functioned as semiotic accelerants – condensing complex political anxieties into a single, emotionally-charged visual.

Still, there is another layer, one that complicates the narrative further. The original video, stripped of its later manipulations, reveals not a government programme but a scene of partisan political theatre. Recorded during the visit of Oluremi Tinubu, the footage captures a group of supporters engaging in a demonstration of symbolic mockery directed at Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. The red underwear, in this context, was not an empowerment tool but a prop in a performative act of political ridicule. The chants, anchored in the phrase “Dan kamfan tsula,” transformed the garment into a metaphor, a physical embodiment of insult within the lexicon of political contestation. Thus, even before digital manipulation intervened, the scene was already saturated with symbolic excess. The body had been politicised; intimacy had been weaponised; clothing had been transformed into rhetoric. What the misinformation architects did, therefore, was to recode an existing spectacle. By inserting the Governor’s image into the visual field, they redirected the symbolic energy of the scene from an opposition figure to the sitting governor. It was a strategic act of semiotic hijacking: take a real event, alter a key element, and release it into the viral bloodstream of social media.

The implications are far-reaching. First, this episode underscores the fragility of visual truth in the digital age. Traditionally, photographs and videos have enjoyed a privileged epistemic status; they are seen as evidence, as records of reality. But digital technologies have destabilised this assumption. Images can now be edited, enhanced, and fabricated with relative ease, blurring the line between documentation and creation. In such a context, seeing is no longer believing; it is merely the beginning of inquiry.

Second, the incident reveals the increasing sophistication of misinformation ecosystems. This was not a case of crude editing or obvious forgery. It was a layered operation involving context stripping, targeted manipulation, and strategic dissemination across multiple platforms. Influencers, high-follower accounts, and blog networks played critical roles in amplifying the content, ensuring its penetration into diverse linguistic and cultural communities, particularly within Northern Nigeria.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the episode highlights the reciprocal relationship between governance and misinformation. Governance creates the conditions under which certain narratives become plausible; misinformation exploits those conditions to produce believable falsehoods. When governance consistently leans towards spectacle, it lowers the threshold of disbelief. It conditions citizens to expect the extraordinary, the absurd, the performative. In doing so, it inadvertently equips misinformation with the raw material it needs to thrive.

This brings us back to the concept of pantomime. Pantomime, in its classical sense, is a form of theatre that relies on exaggerated gestures, symbolic actions, and minimal dialogue. It communicates through performance rather than substance, through visibility rather than depth. When governance adopts this mode, when it prioritises what is seen over what is done, it risks becoming a pantomime of itself. But in the age of memeotics, pantomime does not remain confined to the stage. It is captured, edited, remixed, and redistributed. It becomes a meme, a template, a narrative. And once it enters this ecosystem, it is no longer under the control of its original authors. It can be reinterpreted, repurposed, and, as in this case, manipulated. The viral underwear saga thus represents a convergence of two dynamics – governance as pantomime and misinformation as performance. The former provides the stage; the latter writes the script.

What, then, is to be done? For citizens, the imperative is clear: cultivate digital literacy. In an environment where information is abundant but verification is scarce, skepticism must become a civic virtue. Before sharing, one must pause; before reacting, one must reflect. Tools for verification – reverse image searches, fact-checking platforms, forensic analysis – must move from the margins to the mainstream of digital behaviour. For media organisations and fact-checkers, the challenge is to scale their interventions. Speed is critical. Misinformation spreads rapidly; corrections must travel just as fast, if not faster. But speed must not come at the expense of rigour. The credibility of fact-checking depends on its methodological transparency and evidentiary strength, i.e., qualities that were commendably demonstrated in this case through multi-layered forensic analysis.

For political actors, the lesson is more complex. It is not enough to debunk false claims; one must also address the underlying conditions that make such claims believable. This requires a shift from perfunctory to substantive governance, from tokenistic gestures to structural interventions. It requires a rethinking of communication strategies, not as tools for image management, but as vehicles for genuine engagement. Above all, it requires a restoration of meaning. Empowerment must once again signify capacity-building – education, skills, access to capital, institutional support. It must not be reduced to distribution, nor conflated with visibility. Language must regain its integrity, its ability to describe reality accurately and meaningfully. For without linguistic clarity, policy loses direction; without semantic integrity, governance loses accountability.

In the final analysis, the journey from pant to pixel is not merely a story of misinformation; it is a reflection of a deeper crisis, a crisis of meaning in contemporary Nigerian governance. It reveals how easily reality can be distorted, how quickly perception can be shaped, and how fragile truth has become in the face of digital manipulation. Yet, it also offers a cautionary insight. If governance continues to operate in the register of pantomime, it will remain vulnerable to the distortions of memeotics. If it prioritises spectacle over substance, it will find its narratives easily hijacked, its actions easily misrepresented, its credibility easily undermined. For in the age of viral images and algorithmic amplification, power is no longer defined solely by authority; it is defined by perception. And perception, increasingly, is mediated by memes. Thus, the task before Nigeria is not merely to combat misinformation, but to transcend the conditions that enable it. It is to move from pantomime to purpose, from spectacle to substance, from meme to meaning. Only then can governance reclaim its voice and ensure that when it speaks, it is not drowned out by the noise of pixels.

Agbedo, a professor of Linguistics, University of Nigeria Nsukka, Fellow of Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, is a public affairs analyst.