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This study investigated lexical labelling of people and their actions in terms of ownership and non-ownership of territories by the Nigerian and Cameroonian newspaper reports on the Bakassi Peninsula border conflict, with a view to uncovering ideologies underlying the representations. Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model of Critical Discourse Analysis which relates discursive practices to social and psychological dimensions was used to analyse instances of labelling in three Nigerian and three Cameroonian English-medium national newspapers. The analyses revealed that the newspapers generally labelled Nigerians in Bakassi as both owners (natives and indigenes) and non-owners (inhabitants and residents). Specifically, the Cameroonian news reports deployed more labels of non-ownership to project Nigerians in Bakassi as mere tenants and occupants of the region while the Nigerian news reports employed …