VEJOH - VERITAS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES

The issues of human rights and human rights violation are global phenomena. Certain measures taken by countries to confront the COVID-19 pandemic ended up constituting violations of human rights as they did not comply with certain legal conditions. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Nigeria had many recorded cases of human right violations as some measures to enforce the lockdown order resulted to the death of Nigerians. Yet, it is believed that the government in Nigeria handled the issue with kid gloves. This study adopted the Agenda Setting theory to examine the portrayal of human right violations in Nigeria during the COVID-19 period to examine the Nollywood film, Lockdown through content analysis. The analysis reveals that during the lockdown, Nigerian experienced many forms of human rights violations which included illegal detention, police brutality, denial of freedom of expression, and socio-economic drawbacks as issues which set the agenda for Nigerians during and after the lockdown. Although the Nigerian film industry, Nollywood, did not produce many films from the COVID-19 experiences in Nigeria, a disservice to the Nigerian society, Lockdown, the film under study, only highlighted the human rights violations without pointing out ways of addressing such violations. This drawback opens the vista for the film industry in Nigeria to produce films which offer suggestions to ameliorating the identified critical concerns.

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