Politicking lives and socio-political responsibilities in disaster situation.

The paper interrogated the politicisation of disasters, dominantly, by political actors and the shifting of responsibilities when it comes to disaster management. The study thus explicated the management, that is, ‘responsibilisation’ of social and political roles when disasters occur in local communities. The study deployed Piotr Cap’s Proximisation and Michael Halliday’s Transitivity in the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework. The study underscored the leveraging of disaster situation to scoring political points, while actual disaster management is ‘responsibilised’ to the communities. The study revealed strategies like bureaucratising role relations, defining agency response and legitimising or delegitimising constraints, and collective response as signification forms in disaster management in Nigeria.