Confrontation in Words: Interactional Impoliteness in Nigerian Political Conflict Discourse

The Nigerian political elites engage in bitter communicative exchanges and conflict-related banter that result in impoliteness. This study investigated interactional banter among sociopolitical actors to identify the triggers and discourse features of impoliteness. A qualitative design was used. Six online conflict-related video posts involving four sociopolitical agents were purposively selected and downloaded from YouTube, where they were posted to reach millions of viewers following the conflicts. The videos were transcribed into text, which was mined using AntConc to identify contextual cues of impoliteness. The study was anchored in Anita Fetza’s contextualisation theory and Jacob Mey’s Pragmatic Acts. Three discourse features triggered impoliteness in political banter: control, affiliation, and status moderation. Attempts to gain territorial and cross-territorial control caused impolite banter; conflicts were caused by inter-party and intra-party affiliation, while attacks on personality and name-calling, with attempts at status moderation, caused impoliteness. Six impolite attacking strategies, namely, accusing, insulting, undermining, mocking, threatening, and mocking, and three counter-impoliteness strategies, namely, debunking, substantiating, and contrasting positions, were bidirectionally used by sociopolitical actors in political banters. The study concludes that political banters in Nigeria are a sequence of attacking, defensive, and counter-attacking acts.