By Farooq A. Kperogi
Several verifiable past tweets by INEC chairman Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan from his time as a professor at the University of Jos unmistakably reveal partisan sympathies for the APC and, more specifically, for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. If he has any regard for institutional integrity, he should own up to them, acknowledge the moral burden they place on his office, and resign. I will return to this.
Amupitan’s neutrality has long hovered under a cloud of suspicion, but I deliberately gave him the benefit of the doubt, to the irritation of many who urged me to call him out earlier and who falsely thought my reluctance to criticize him was the result of my having a relationship with him.
When it surfaced that he had written a tendentious memo alleging a “Christian genocide” without acknowledging equally horrific Muslim deaths in the recurring communal violence in central Nigeria, I attributed it to what I call epistemic closure, a condition where a person’s informational environment is so internally reinforcing that outside evidence is dismissed or never encountered. In that state, complex issues get reduced to narrow, self-confirming interpretations because the person is effectively sealed inside a filter bubble.
For a professor and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, that kind of intellectual insularity is disappointing. It runs against the grain of scholarly training, which stresses self-criticism and transcendence. Still, I did not think it was sufficient to establish bias.
When he was criticized for fixing the 2027 election during Ramadan, I again resisted the rush to judgment. Islam does not prohibit work during Ramadan, and several Muslim-majority countries have conducted elections in that period. Besides, with figures like Malam Mohammed Haruna on the commission, it would be simplistic to assign sole responsibility to him. So, even at the cost of being suspected of unduly shielding him, I held my fire.
But two developments began to strain my charitable reading of his actions. His push to revalidate permanent voter cards, which carried the risk of disenfranchising millions, gave me pause. Then his interventions in the ADC’s internal crisis revealed a man who struggled unsuccessfully to conceal partisan impulses aligned with Tinubu’s apparent determination to fracture the opposition and stall the emergence of a viable challenger.
Even these, troubling as they were, pale beside what emerged on Friday. Evidence now shows that in 2023, about two years before his appointment as INEC chairman, Amupitan used an X account bearing his name to engage in openly partisan commentary.
On March 18, 2023, Dayo Israel, the APC’s National Youth Leader, whom Amupitan followed, boasted that he had flipped his “nearby,” “Igbo-dominated” polling unit from the opposition to the APC. Amupitan replied: “Victory is sure.”
Pause on that for a moment. This was a direct affirmation of a partisan boast couched in ethnically coded language. The reference to an “Igbo-dominated” polling unit invokes the ethnic polarization that defined much of the 2023 election cycle. To respond to such a claim with “Victory is sure” is to align oneself not just with a party, but with a particular narrative of electoral conquest over an implicitly defined “other.”
A day earlier, March 17, 2023, one Okodoro Oro circulated a claim that Peter Obi supporters had repurposed an old photograph of a bloodied man to malign Lagos State legislator Desmond Elliot. Amupitan’s response was: “They are evil in the 24th [sic] century.”
This is not the language of a detached observer. It is the language of moral condemnation directed at a clearly identified political camp. To be fair, future electoral umpires are not
