Prince Tony Akeni, Labour Party National Publicity Secretary (Interim) — October 10, 2025
Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan has a fate larger than life thrust at his feet — to either redeem the largest democracy in Africa or further mutilate and bury its corpse, which the ballot master-liar of all time, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood, has left behind as INEC Chairman.
Above the perks, glamour, and glitter of the highly visible office which Prof. Amupitan now occupies, he must choose what he wishes to achieve and be remembered for.
He must choose whom he will serve and the legacy he wishes to leave behind for his name and posterity.
He must choose whether to be honoured by over 230 million Nigerians who employed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, or to serve the unconstitutional wishes and caprices of a single man, Tinubu, who appointed him.
To help him make that choice, Prof. Amupitan will do well to reflect on how more than 230 million Nigerians at home and all over the world will forever remember his immediate predecessor, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood.
Under the Obasanjo years, when Nigerians thought Prof. Maurice Iwu was the worst electoral referee that happened to Nigeria, Prof. Attahiru Jega emerged and erased that record — to the extent that Elder Godsday Orubebe, then Minister of Niger Delta, screamed blue murder and embarked on a one-man rampage against INEC at the 2015 presidential election collation centre before the world press and international observers.
At the close of that era, when Nigerians thought it was impossible to manufacture a worse election overseer than Jega, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood came to mortally mar the mood and seal the hopes of Nigerians that elections could ever be free, fair, or credible, destroying the last vestige of Nigeria’s electoral integrity almost beyond redemption.
Before Mahmood’s tenure as INEC Chairman, Nigerians merely lamented whether their votes would count — but with some reservoir of hope. However, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood buried that hope and made it a proverb of despair set in concrete, creating endemic voter apathy throughout Nigeria unlike any other country in Africa.
In the run-up to the 2023 general elections, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood promised real-time transmission of ballot results from polling units via BIVAS and IREV servers, only to brazenly reverse himself and dismiss BIVAS results as non-compulsory. He and his returning officers then uploaded mutilated and duplicated result sheets supplied by the ruling party, stood by those falsifications at the tribunals, and returned falsified results in the presidential, governorship, and legislative elections — denying the Labour Party’s actual landslide victory.
As his final service to the ruling APC, for which President Tinubu rewarded him with the national honour of Commander of the Order of the Niger (CON), Prof. Mahmood engineered a voter registration heist by awarding 393,269 new voters in Osun State alone against just 1,998 new voters in the five South-East states combined — Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo.
The Labour Party especially remembers Prof. Mahmood Yakubu’s pretentious cooperation in internal party justice, while covertly betraying it. He sabotaged the Labour Party by unlawfully delisting it from local government elections (2025), the Abuja Municipal Council elections (2026), and similar polls nationwide.
He also retained the defunct Julius Abure-led leadership of the party on INEC’s portal in defiance of Supreme Court and Federal High Court judgments, both of which unequivocally ruled that Abure’s leadership had ended.
That is the Prof. Yakubu Mahmood Nigerians and the Labour Party remember — and history will also remember and wrinkle its nose at his name.
For the Labour Party, the first litmus test for the new INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan, is to remove Julius Abure and his defunct council from INEC’s portal and replace them with the Nenadi Usman-led council, duly submitted by the party’s NEC in line with the Supreme Court judgment affirming that party leadership is an internal matter. This aligns with both Nigerian and global administrative conventions that forbid leadership vacuums in institutional management.
As he steps into the shoes of his predecessor, Prof. Joash Amupitan must realize that he is under the watchful eyes of Nigerians, the civilized world, the West, and emerging democracies that look to Nigeria for example.
Amupitan must prove that he is not another electoral vampire serving the dictates of incumbents and ballot moneybags, but a true electoral umpire determined to serve and save Nigeria’s long-troubled democracy.
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