The article examines how Nigeria’s former President, Muhammadu Buhari, was portrayed in the media during the 2015 political campaigns using corpus linguistics and Halliday’s transitivity model. Analyzing texts from six national newspapers over seven months, the study employs a corpus-assisted approach with the Wordsmith concordance tool and Systemic Functional Linguistics to examine how agency and processes shaped Buhari's representation. The findings show a predominantly negative portrayal, with Buhari's name frequently collocating with negatively connoted words. The transitivity analysis reveals he was depicted as benefiting from terrorist actions and stereotyped as a religious fundamentalist and pro-corruption figure. The study concludes that media representation was biased, as Buhari, despite being negatively portrayed, won the 2015 elections, challenging the notion of media objectivity in representing reality.

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