Multimodality of Tact Enactment to Stay Safe during the COVID-19 Pandemic-ridden Period

Abstract

This paper examines drama of reality orchestrated on the heels of the outbreak of a pandemic known as CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19). The disease which erupted in China around December 2019 started killing in hundreds and thousands without any tested drug in sight to quell its furnace except precautionary measures like ‘social distancing’ ‘Hand wash with sanitizer’, ‘wearing of face mask’ and the like.  Cases were purposely selected through the affordances of newspapers, recorded newscast, social media applications like WhatsApp, and You-tube. Multimodality as well as Tact Maxim was considered an apt theoretical framework to capture selected instances in the Nigerian situation owing to the exploitation of semiotics and other linguistic nuances involved in the data collection. The critical analysis of the drama revealed that the world had never been the same, and that in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new world-order was imminent ; just like it had happened after the historic 1720 , 1820, and 1920 occurrences. The pandemic period was therefore a show of insincerity in governance, ingratitude, display of abject poverty necessitating renewed dedication to salient essentials of life. The religious circle was not spared as adherents became wiser when the hitherto mammoth crowd as a show of affluence and generosity became replaced with defined gathering, The paper concluded on a note that it is time non-realistic and non-productive policies were jettisoned in order to forestall future re-occurrences of the pandemic. These, in the Nigerian situation should take the form of reducing the recurrent expenditure of the legislature, avoiding mono-economy and re-diversifying, redefining the essential and non-essential services, intensifying e-learning/banking, etc, curbing the excesses of law-enforcement agents and civilians alike. These would go a long way to better the lot of the masses, provided sincerity, transparency and accountability become the watch-word of governance.