By FAROOQ 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 expected to be devoid of private opinions, but when those opinions are expressed in such stark, emotionally charged terms in the heat of a contested election, they take on a different significance.

Then came April 25, 2023. A Tinubu support account celebrated the reception Tinubu received at the Abuja airport. Amupitan responded with a single word: “Asiwaju.”

To the uninitiated, this may appear harmless, even innocuous. It isn’t. “Asiwaju” is a political identity marker. In Yoruba, it means “leader” or “one who leads from the front,” much like “jagaba,” his other prominent title from Borgu, but in the context of Nigerian politics, particularly the 2023 election, it functioned as a rallying cry, a badge of allegiance, and a shorthand for loyalty to Bola Ahmed Tinubu. It is the word chanted at rallies, emblazoned on campaign materials, and deployed in digital spaces to signal belonging to a political movement.

When a supporter says “Asiwaju,” it is an affirmation of fealty. So, when a man who would later become the chairman of the electoral commission uses that word in direct response to a celebratory message about Tinubu, he is participating in a community of praise. He is, in that moment, not an observer of politics, but a participant in its partisan theater, in patterned expressions of alignment.

After these tweets resurfaced, the account in question underwent a series of transformations. The handle changed from @joashamupitan to @Sundayvibe00, rebranded as a “parody” account and then locked from public view. But digital traces are stubborn. Archival indexing still ties the earlier posts to the original identity.

So, the sequence is straightforward. An account using Amupitan’s name made partisan interventions during the 2023 election cycle. That same account later changed identity multiple times, adopted a parody label, and restricted access. The timing of these changes invites obvious questions about transparency and accountability, particularly for someone who now occupies the most sensitive electoral office in the country.

What makes this especially unsettling for me is that I publicly defended him in the past. In my October 11, 2025 column, “New INEC Boss and Tinubu’s Visibilisation of Northern Yorubas,” I described him as “an accomplished professor of law and a revered Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has no known record of partisan political affiliations.” That judgment was based on the evidence available at the time. We now know better.

The issue is not that Amupitan, as a private citizen, held political opinions. Every citizen is entitled to that. The issue is that those opinions were expressed in ways that align distinctly with one party, in the very period that defined Nigeria’s most contentious recent election, and that he now presides over an institution that demands not just neutrality, but the appearance of neutrality.

Electoral legitimacy is not sustained by legal technicalities alone. It rests on public trust. Once that trust is eroded, even the most procedurally sound election becomes suspect in the eyes of citizens. That is why electoral umpires are held to a higher standard than ordinary public officials. They must be above reproach not only in conduct but in perception. Amupitan’s past tweets compromise that perception.

He has compounded the problem by failing to confront the matter directly. He should address the public, acknowledge the tweets, and reckon with their implications. The moral weight of his current office is incompatible with unresolved questions about partisan loyalty.

Yes, the law makes his removal cumbersome. The president must initiate the process, and the Senate must approve it with a two-thirds majority. In practice, that threshold is hardly insurmountable for a president who commands legislative loyalty, who gets bills debated and passed in a matter of hours. But it is unrealistic to expect President Tinubu to initiate the removal of a man whose perceived partisan alignment may well have recommended him for the position in the first place.

Which leaves only one honorable path: resignation, which Nigerian public officers loathe. If he has any ounce of integrity left, he should resign because if he chooses to remain, every election he conducts in which the APC prevails will be shadowed by credible allegations of premeditated bias. No serious observer will dismiss such claims out of hand. In trying to protect his position, he would end up damaging both the institution he leads and, ironically, the party he is presumed to favor.

Nigeria has had electoral umpires accused of partisanship before. But rarely has the evidence been this direct, this traceable, and this difficult to explain away.

If he stays, Amupitan risks inscribing his name in history not merely as a controversial INEC chairman, but as one whose tenure deepened, or completely eroded, public distrust in the electoral process.

POSTSCRIPT:

As I was about to file this column, my editor drew my attention to a news release by INEC’s Chief Press Secretary, Adedayo Oketola, claiming that the Twitter account associated with Amupitan, created in 2022, is “fake.”

That claim does not withstand basic scrutiny. In 2022, Amupitan was an obscure professor. There was no incentive to impersonate him. The tweets now in contention were posted in 2023, before he became INEC chairman.

Fake accounts do not typically maintain a coherent history, then change handles, rebrand as parody, and lock themselves the moment their past becomes inconvenient. That pattern suggests an attempt to obscure prior activity, not random impersonation.

The statement is notably silent on the disappearance of the original handle, the shift to a new identity, the sudden “parody” label, and the decision to restrict public access.

•Prof. Kperogi, a US-based Nigerian scholar, is a syndicated columnist.

Update news