It’s therefore obvious that while Amupitan is eminently qualified for this job—he is an accomplished professor of law and a revered Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has no known record of partisan political affiliations…
By FAROOQ A. KPEROGI
Everyone who is familiar with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s unabashed Yorubacentricism expected him to appoint a Yoruba person to succeed Professor Mahmood Yakubu as INEC chairman.
However, because, as I pointed out in my September 20 column, no president, prime minister, or head of state has ever appointed an INEC chairman from his immediate geopolitical region, Tinubu’s Yorubacentric excesses had a restraining order.
Of course, Tinubu really doesn’t care what anybody thinks about his overt project of inaugurating and sustaining Yoruba hegemony in Nigeria’s national sphere. He could easily have appointed the next INEC chairman from the Southwest and watched with satisfied amusement as people from other regions squirmed in impotent rage.
But he had an alternative, which he seized. There are Yoruba people in northern Nigeria. Why risk needless, even if impotent, national outrage by appointing someone from Osun, his native state, or Lagos, his adopted state, when he could achieve the same Yorubacentric state capture by appointing a Yoruba person from the North? Thus, we have Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, a Yoruba man from Kogi State, as the new INEC boss.
To be fair, that was precisely what Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, did. Although Mahmood Yakubu is from the Northeast and Buhari is from the Northwest, their identities are indistinct. They are both “Hausa-Fulani,” a term Buhari said he personally liked because it accurately captures the complexity of his ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity.
Like Buhari, Yakubu traces patrilineal descent to the Fulani but is linguistically and culturally Hausa. So, the fact that they come from different so-called geopolitical zones doesn’t erase the reality that they are more or less indistinguishable in identity terms.
Just as Buhari and Yakubu are both “Hausa-Fulani” who happen to belong to different “geo-political zones,” Tinubu and Amupitan are both “Yoruba” (although there are people from Kogi West such as Professor Etannibi Alemika and journalist Tunde Asaju who insist they are not Yoruba) but from different regions.
In fact, unlike Buhari and Yakubu, who share not just common ethnic and regional identities but also similar faiths, Tinubu and Amupitan do not share the same faith. Tinubu is a Muslim, while Amupitan is a Christian. Of course, as I’ve pointed out multiple times in past columns, in the South, where Tinubu is from, ethnicity is a more potent instrument of identification than religion.
It’s therefore obvious that while Amupitan is eminently qualified for this job—he is an accomplished professor of law and a revered Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has no known record of partisan political affiliations, even though a few people mistook him for Professor Taiwo Osipitan, a Tinubu lawyer in the 2023 election—the primary reason Tinubu chose him is his Yoruba identity.