PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

This article used Roland Barthe's Rhetoric of the Image to analyse newspaper political ads of two presidential aspirants of a political party that defined Nigeria's nascent democracy from 1999 to 2015. Semiotics was employed as a theory and method to engender an understanding of how persuasive messages are used to elicit party support in Nigerian and by extension, African political communication systems. It can be inferred from the evidence that the candidates' rhetoric was conveyed using denotative and connotative messages. The linguistic messages were conveyed through denotative meanings using anchorage and relay - two functions of linguistic messages in ads - to direct the reader to preferred meanings and to add extra meaning to a preferred one. The connotations from the ad visuals were conveyed using polysemic meanings. However, the visuals did not signify the party's ideology, though ideology is the common domain of the signified in ad visuals. Overall, the Daily Trust and The Guardian were instruments in conveying the aspirants' persuasive messages on salient economic, political and social issues.