INEC Chairman: Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan – will he perform without glitches?
On Thursday, October 23, 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu sworn-in Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan [SAN] as the number 16th Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission – which of course started in 1958, as Electoral Commission of Nigeria [ECN].
Professor Amupitan, a Yoruba speaking native of Ayetoro Gbede, in Ijumu Local Government Area (LGA) of Kogi State – has a historical place of honour as being the first Chairman of INEC ever appointed from the North-Central geopolitical zone of Nigeria, and he came to the INEC job academically loaded. He is a Professor of Law, with specialization and experience in Law of Evidence, Corporate Governance, Corporate Law and Privatization Law, and was, at the time of appointment to the INEC job, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Administration) at the University of Jos.
Permit me to mention Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan’s predecessors, their years of tenure, the geopolitical zone where each of the appointees came from, and the name of the electoral body as then called.
A zone-by-zone geopolitical analysis shows that the South-South had produced seven; the South-East, three; the North-West, two; the North-East, one; the North-Central, one [which is now Professor Amupitan] and the Southwest, none. Below is the accurate names and time-tenure of each of Professor Amupitan’s predecessor:
- Ronald Edward Wraith – a British (1958)
- Eyo Ita Esua (1964 – 1966)
- Michael Ani (1976 – 1979)
- Victor Ovie-Whisky (1980 – 1983)
- Eme Awa (1987–1989)
- Humphrey Nwosu (1989 – 1993)
- Okon Edet Uya (1993–1993)
- Sumner Dagogo-Jack (1994 – 1998)
- Ehraim Akpata (1998– 2000)
- Abel Guobadia (2000– 2005)
- Maurice Iwu (2005 – 2010)
- Attahiru Jega (2010 – 2015)
- Amina Bala Zakari (Acted from June – November 2015)
- Mahmood Yakubu (2015- 2025)
- May Agbamuche-Mbu [who acted for a few days before Professor Joash Amupitan took over.
- Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan [2025 —-]
Icing the cake of the appointees and those who appointed them.
- Eyo Ita Esua, from Cross River State, a teacher and unionist became Nigeria’s first electoral umpire when he was appointed in 1964 by Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. He presided over the 1964 parliamentary and 1965 regional elections.
- During the General Olusegun Obasanjo’s regime, the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) was created. Michael Ani, also from Cross River State, a career civil servant and former commissioner in Ironsi’s cabinet, was named its chairman.
- Ani supervised the 1979 elections that returned the country to civil rule under President Shehu Shagari. He was later succeeded by Justice Victor Ovie-Whisky of Delta State, appointed by Shagari in 1980.
- Eme Awa, a political scientist, was appointed by the military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, in 1987, to head the National Electoral Commission (NEC) as part of the transition to civilian rule. Awa was in 1989 succeeded by Prof. Humphrey Nwosu who presided over what is often described as the high point of electoral administration in Nigeria’s history; the annulled June 12, 1993, presidential election won by Chief Moshood Abiola.
- Nwosu was later, in 1993, replaced with Prof. Okon Edet Uya, a historian from Akwa Ibom State whose tenure conducted no major election before General Sani Abacha’s regime, in November 1993, dissolved the NEC and renamed it National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (NECON) in 1994. The commission was chaired by Chief Sumner Dagogo-Jack from Rivers State, a lawyer and administrator who conducted local and legislative elections.
- After the death of Abacha on June 8, 1998, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, then Chief of Defence Staff, who replaced him, dissolved NECON and established the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), headed by Ephraim Akpata, a Supreme Court judge from Edo State. The commission conducted the 1999 general elections that produced President Olusegun Obasanjo.
- Justice Akpata died on January 8, 2000, and was replaced with Dr Abel Guobadia, from Edo State, by President Obasanjo, to consolidate INEC’s structures. Guobadia, an academic and technocrat, supervised the 2003 elections.
- Guobadia retired on completing his five-year term in May 2005, and was succeeded by Professor Maurice Iwu, from Imo State, in 2005. A professor of Pharmacognosy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Iwu served as the third chairman of the INEC.
- Iwu-led INEC conducted the 2007 general elections, including presidential, legislative and state elections, which were among his key undertakings while in office.
- On 28 April 2010, Iwu was removed by Acting President Goodluck Jonathan and replaced him with Professor Attahiru Jega, from Kebbi State, on June 8, 2010.
- Professor Jega-led INEC conducted the 2011 general elections that produced President Jonathan and the 2015 general elections that produced President Muhammadu Buhari.
- When Jega retired in 2015 and was replaced with Amina Bala Zakari, from Jigawa State, as acting chairman until Professor Mahmood Yakubu, from Bauchi State, was appointed same year.
- Despite the reforms that have reshaped Nigeria’s electoral process, his tenure has been dogged by controversies, particularly over “glitches” in the result viewing portal and delays in uploading results during the 2023 general elections.
At the swearing in of Professor Amupitan, President Bola Tinubu spoke direct to both the erudite Professor – on the trajectory of his past, and to the beginning of his journey as Chairman of INEC.
Let us take a listening to what the president told the newly sworn-in INEC Chairman.
“As the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, your nomination to the important role and the subsequent confirmation by the Senate is a testament to your capacity and the confidence reposed in you by both the executive and the legislative arm of government.
“The significant achievement marked the beginning of a challenging yet rewarding journey, and I trust that you will approach your responsibilities with the highest level of integrity, dedication and patriotism.
“Our democracy has come a long way. In 25 years, we have consolidated and strengthened our democratic institutions, particularly our electoral system, through innovation and reforms. We have learned a great deal along the way and have improved significantly from where we were many years ago.
“We must now remain committed to the principles that underpin democracy in a complex, multifaceted society,” the President said.
“The electoral process is a vital part of a democracy, safeguarding the people’s exclusive right to choose their leaders and shape their future. To ensure that our democracy continues to flourish, the integrity of our electoral system must be beyond reproach. It is important that our elections are free, fair and credible.
“We must consistently improve our electoral process, addressing the challenges of yesterday and innovating for today and tomorrow. To maintain public trust in elections, electoral integrity must be protected. All aspects of the process, from registration to campaigning, immediate access, voting and counting should be transparent, non-violent and credible. No electoral system is flawless, but since elections are vital to a nation’s future, it is essential to continually strengthen electoral institutions, ensuring they are robust, resilient and safeguarded against official setbacks.
“I therefore charge you, Professor, as you take on this important assignment to protect the integrity of our elections and electoral process and strengthen the institutional capacity of INEC,” President Tinubu concluded.
This was the President’s charge to the man he appointed. And of course, the president spoke well by telling the Professor what he expected him to accomplish while delivering the responsibility of the oat of office. In extension therefore, what the president told the erudite professor was that Nigerians expected much from him, ditto the international community, on service-delivering-accomplishment.
Did Professor Amupitan understand the president, who spoke on behalf of himself, the Nigerian government and the Nigerian people? I might not be wrong to say that he understood everything or should have understood what the master told him.
We should not also forget the fact that the man – Amupitan, being a seasoned academician, erudite distinguished member of the Bar [SAN], would have more than enough competent reason to understand every word the president told him that day when he was being sworn-in. It is also very important that we respectfully understand that the man could also interpret the unspoken language of the president – what most political pundits would call “body language”, during the swearing-in ceremony.
And there is a cogent reason for this writer to submit – this submission is as result of having been a political technocrat over the Nigerian political scene for many years, that the man [Professor Amupitan]’s personal survival; if that would be his chosen course of travelling, he would be more to the side of implementing the ethos of the unspoken, or body language, than the publicly applauded statement of the president.
It is however too early to place judgment on what Professor Amupitan shall be doing, or chosen not to do, at this time of his INEC’s journey into the “wild voyage of discovering”. Let us be more positive, believing that the man would want to be kind to the recording of his historical journey – that being the first Professor of Law from his Kogi State, and being the first ever-Chairman of INEC from the North-Central, he would want to play the game of performances better without political glitches.
It is better for us not to attempt creating and interpreting any ulterior motive into his mind, on what he may want to do, or not be doing, but instead, let us listen to his words of promises on how he would carry out the discharge of the responsibility of his duties. With such open minds, it would be patriotic to flow and pray with him on any guidelines he speaks about to us as his destination of achieving. And he spoke very frontally, for the first time, about how he would do his work.
This was on Monday, October 29, 2025, at the 56th Annual National Conference of the Nigerian Association of Law Teachers [NALT], which held at the University of Abuja.
Delivery his paper, Professor Amupitan started by vowing to “end the courtroom warfare that often began long before ballots were cast”. adding that; “that is not democracy, saying that is litigation by other means.”
He was emphatic by saying that the electoral umpire would not continue to operate in a system where over 1,000 pre-election cases were recorded ahead of the 2023 general elections.
He was not done yet. Let us listen to his conclusions on the way he has chosen to navigate out of the Court’s total eruption of the Nigerian democratic electoral system as the situation is currently.
“If political parties obey their constitutions, respect the Electoral Act and align with the Nigerian constitution, the avalanche of pre-election cases will collapse. My goal is simple: to make the law an instrument of change, not chaos. “My desire is that when we get the law right, even the losers will be the first to congratulate the winner. That is when we can truly say our democracy has matured.”
The professor called on the National Assembly to strengthen the country’s electoral laws, insisting that the credibility of elections depended on robust legal frameworks and political parties that practiced genuine internal democracy.
While acknowledging that some lawyers might not welcome a reduction in election-related cases, he maintained that the move was necessary to restore public confidence in the system, “we cannot continue to allow the courts to determine our elections. Elections must be won at the polling units, not in the courtroom.”
Let our political leaders be elected by the electors, at the polling stations, through casting of our ballot papers – and not through the courts, where a few judges and justices [not more than 60 men and women] would decide whom, our elected political leader would be.
This is a taboo. It is an aberration. It is a big fraud against electioneering democracy. It is a crime against any democratic processes. And, above all, it a blunt attack against Nigerian registered voters.
This is the factual pronouncement of Professor Joash Ojo Amupital. In a plain language, the Professor has told Nigerians that he would not conduct any fraudulent elections and tell the losers to “go to Court”. That era is gone, and for ever – courtesy of Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan.
Well said Sir, and on your mandate, we are waiting!
Godwin Etakibuebu; a Veteran Journalist, wrote from Lagos.
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Nice one Sir