"ESCAPING THE NATION": A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF ECONOMIC DESPAIR AND IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN NIGERIAN "JAPA" DISCOURSE ON X

Nigeria has witnessed an unprecedented wave of emigration-oriented discourse, popularly crystallised under the Yoruba vernacular term japa, meaning to flee swiftly. What began as colloquial street parlance has evolved into a dense ideological lexicon through which millions of Nigerians publicly negotiate economic despair, fractured citizenship, and the moral legitimacy of permanent relocation. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and digital discourse studies, this article examines how japa-related conversations on X (formerly Twitter) discursively construct Nigeria as a failed developmental space, assign contrasting identities to those who migrate versus those who remain, and articulate neoliberal self-rescue narratives that effectively replace the rhetoric of collective political agency. A purposive corpus of 412 posts collected between January 2023 and September 2024 was subjected to multi-layered discourse analysis, integrating Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, Van Dijk's ideological square, and Martin and White's Appraisal Theory. The analysis identifies five dominant discursive formations: governance failure as existential threat, migration as rational escape, the moral disqualification of non-migrants, classed aspirational mobility, and the symbolic de-citizening of Nigeria. The findings suggest that japa discourse constitutes a significant site of postcolonial ideological contestation in which the nation-state is not merely critiqued but symbolically abandoned. The study contributes to African digital discourse studies, migration linguistics, and Global South mobility scholarship by foregrounding the underexplored affective and ideological dimensions of online emigration narratives