Language Differences and Communication for Political Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa

The entire world continues to experience challenges such as climate change, pandemics and wars. This trickles down to Africa, a continent that continues to be ravaged by governance deficits evident in political challenges such as institutional coups, military coups and corruption. Achieving political governance is becoming a pipe dream in Africa due to the diverse nature of the continent, characterized by a mesh of cultural diversity, language differences being a crucial facet. The political class has used languages as tools for political polarization, evident in the deliberate radicalization of ethnic political groups, formation of ethnically oriented political parties, and further barring sensitive messaging from diverse language groups in Africa through the use of the vernacular in political rallies. For decades, the implication of language and communication has been ignored in political transformation. Hence, this work adopts the theory of conversational implicature, which states that what an expression means should not be confused with what orators mean when they use that expression. This theory centers on the co-operative principle in language and communication, encompassing four maxims: quality, quantity, relation and manner. Most often, when politicians use language as a tool to advance their agenda, they tend to flout these maxims, either intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, this study is guided by the co-operative principle in unearthing the political polarization due to language abuse by most sub-Saharan politicians, adopting a corpus-based approach to analysis of their selected audio-visual and written texts.