Governing the Ungoverned: Emotional AI, Nigerian Communication Policy, and the Case for a National Regulatory Framework

Ighodalo Uyi Ebhodaghe, Jide Johnson

ABSTRACT Across Nigeria's Fourth Republic, successive election cycles have been accompanied by the systematic circulation of manipulative political content, a problem that has deepened considerably with the emergence of Emotional Artificial Intelligence (EAI): computational systems engineered to detect, simulate, and exploit human emotional states for persuasive political ends. This article addresses a critical and under-examined research problem: Nigeria's communication policy architecture, comprising the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), and the National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (NCAIR), was substantially designed before the emergence of generative and affective AI, and currently provides no coherent regulatory instrument for governing EAI's deployment in political communication. While a growing body of scholarship has examined AI ethics, African media governance, and Nigerian communication policy in isolation, no existing study has examined the specific intersection of EAI and Nigeria's regulatory gap, nor proposed a governance framework calibrated to Nigeria's institutional realities and the urgency of its 2027 general elections. This gap constitutes the justification for the present inquiry. Employing critical policy analysis as its methodological framework, drawing on governance theory (Baldwin, Cave, & Lodge, 2012), comparative regulatory analysis of the EU AI Act (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2024), and African AI ethics scholarship (Gwagwa, Kazim, & Hilliard, 2022; Ayana et al., 2024), and guided by the research question of how Nigeria's communication governance architecture should be adapted to address EAI in political journalism and electoral communication, this article finds that Nigeria's institutions collectively constitute a regulatory double failure: definitional, in that no Nigerian instrument defines EAI, and institutional, in that no single body has jurisdiction over its misuse in political contexts. In response, we propose a four-pillar Nigeria-Specific EAI Ethics Framework, Awareness and Literacy, Emotional Responsibility, Governance and Guidelines, and Trust and Transparency, as a practical, decolonially-grounded governance starting point. The article's contribution to knowledge is twofold: it provides the first systematic mapping of Nigeria's EAI regulatory gap, and it advances an original, context-sensitive governance framework adapted to Nigeria's institutional landscape ahead of the 2027 elections. Keywords: Emotional AI, Nigerian communication policy, media governance, AI regulation, NITDA, NCAIR, journalism ethics, EAI framework, African AI governance.