LAUSR

As constitutional and other structural reforms are intensified to reduce ethnic politics in some sub-Saharan African countries, political elites are exploiting new ways of accessing and consolidating their hold on political power by manipulating ethnicity. This article explores the import of hate speech in recent elections in Nigeria. Using primary and secondary data from Nigeria’s fourth democratic dispensation, the authors show that elites employ hate speech to curry favor along every possible line of diversity—such as ethnicity, geopolitical region, and religion—to retain or obtain political power. The study shows that hate speech has been elevated to the status of a political campaign strategy and suggests that serious checks and balances should be evolved to ensure the sustained reduction of ethnic politics so as to improve democratic consolidation. Part of these checks would be to enact laws that guard against the use of hate speech as a political campaign strategy.