Negotiating Democratic Precarity through Multilingual Political Communication: MAMSER and Nigeria's Interrupted Democratic Transition

Political transitions generate democratic precarity when governments seek legitimacy through communication while citizens confront institutional uncertainty. Under Ibrahim Babangida’s military administration, Nigeria’s transition programme was both an institutional project and a large-scale political communication exercise. Established in 1987, the Directorate for Mass Mobilisation for Self-Reliance, Social Justice and Economic Recovery (MAMSER) connected democracy with responsible citizenship, electoral participation, discipline, self-reliance and national renewal. Existing studies have examined its programmes and contribution to political education, but have paid less attention to the multilingual mediation of its messages or to how the June 12 annulment altered their meaning. Addressing this gap, the article examines MAMSER’s communication in Rivers State between 1987 and 1993. Drawing on official documents, campaign speeches, reported recollections of former personnel and an exploratory questionnaire on public memory, it analyses the production, mediation and disruption of democratic meaning. English conveyed institutional authority, while Nigerian Pidgin and indigenous languages of Rivers State supported cross-group engagement and reported local explanation. Radio, television, rallies and community meetings carried these messages beyond formal administrative settings. The annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election separated voting from its anticipated political consequence, creating conditions for resistant reinterpretation of the state’s participatory discourse. The article conceptualises this contradiction as communicative rupture. As a Global South case, MAMSER demonstrates that multilingual mediation can make a precarious political project accessible and publicly meaningful but cannot preserve legitimacy when institutional action invalidates the expectations communicated to citizens.