“Our mandate is very clear. That is to deliver free, fair, and credible elections that reflect the will of the people. The integrity of our elections is not negotiable. Every voter must feel confident that their vote counts.”
With these words, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Joash Amupitan, declared his readiness to recalibrate Nigeria’s electoral process towards ensuring its credibility during his interactive session with journalists when he assumed duty on October 23, 2025.
Since then, he has made other reassuring statements about his mission at INEC and why Nigerians should have faith in the commission under his watch.
For instance, while addressing participants at the 56th Annual Conference of Nigerian Association of Law Teachers (NALT), held at the University of Abuja recently, Amupitan said the country could no longer afford a situation where the courts would continue to decide winners of elections, stressing that elections must be won and lost at the polling units. He also noted that with sound legal framework and necessary reforms, election losers won’t hesitate to congratulate the winners.
Also, at a stakeholders’ forum at Awka last Tuesday in preparation for the November 8 Anambra State governorship election, the first poll he would oversee as INEC helmsman, he gave assurances that the commission was fully prepared to ensure a smooth and credible process. The INEC chairman warned electoral officials to strictly comply with the Electoral Act, saying any misconduct would attract sanctions. He identified vote-buying as a possible challenge during the election and appealed: “Let’s all say no to vote-buying and all forms of rigging.”
To many analysts, Amupitan must introduce crucial reforms if he hopes to walk the talk at INEC. An academic like his predecessor in office, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, who chaired INEC from 2015 to 2025, Amupitan is a Professor of Law at the University of Jos, Plateau State and an alumnus of the university. He specialises in Company Law, Law of Evidence, Corporate Governance and Privatisation Law. A Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) for over a decade, he no doubt has the requisite knowledge, experience and exposure to positively impact Nigeria’s electoral processes.
According to a public affairs analyst, Mr. Jide Ojo, the Anambra governorship election would open his eyes to the demand of his new assignment.
His words: “He resumed barely two weeks ago. He has said all the right things – that they will not tolerate logistical challenges and that they will also not allow vote buying. But I think the election is going to be a baptism of fire of sort for Prof. Amupitan. He will be learning the ropes. Yes, he is a Professor of Law; he is an administrator par excellence. But he is in a new field altogether.
“And as you know, election has its own emotion and spirit. I was shocked to read about a former Sokoto State Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) who the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) officials saw $49,700 in his house in Kano. There were insinuations that two former governors of the state actually bribed him with that sum. Also, remember the Abia REC who rebuffed every overture by the political class to compromise her during the 2023 general election. That tells you how desperate politicians can be.
“Why I’m making reference to these is because the Chairman of INEC essentially doesn’t have control over what goes on in the field. A lot of things happen in the field that the person in Abuja may not be aware of. Abuja people can only set the policy framework and provide supervision. So, you need to keep your ears to the ground to be sure that your field officers are not compromising on the field.
“Prof. Amupitan will be learning very fast ahead of the forthcoming off-cycle governorship elections in Ekiti and Osun states. I am hoping that everything will work out well for him in Anambra so that the uninitiated will not ascribe whatever goes wrong to him, because by the time he resumed, preparation for the Anambra election had already got to the advanced stage. In fact, 11 out of 13 activities had already been done, waiting for the election. I think he will just be in the situation room in Abuja to monitor what is going on in the field. But in subsequent elections, he will be involved in the planning, providing direction on how things should be done.”
Ojo noted that there are 142 recommendations INEC made from the 2023 elections report that Amupitan is expected to spearhead their implementation, saying some of the recommendations are for INEC, while some are for the National Assembly, security agencies, the civil society, political parties and contestants.
He added: “For those ones that are administrative, he will have to pick them and run with them. For instance, there is lopsidedness in voter distribution across polling units, which needs to be addressed. Some polling units have zero, five or 50 voters while some have as much as 1,500 to 2000 voters. They need to address that because after they created additional 56,000 polling units, bringing the total number of polling units to 176,868 or thereabout, they have not been able to arrive at the minimum or maximum threshold for each polling unit, which should be 500 voters. In previous elections, INEC had announced that they would not hold elections in some polling units because there are no voters there or the number of voters is too few. So, that is something that should be addressed administratively.
“There is also the issue of voter registration. There are clamours that doing it at INEC local council offices is cumbersome for people; that it needs to be devolved to the ward levels and maybe even to the polling unit levels if the resources are available. The commission also needs to look into that.
“Then, there is the issue of how to ensure proper recruitment, training and deployment of ad hoc staff. Right now they advertise and people apply through the INEC portal and they randomly select among the applicants. But some of the people selected have partisan interest and there is no time to properly screen them. I think they deployed about 22,000 ad hoc staff for the Anambra election. The police do not have the grace period to do background checks on that number of people.
“I think what needs to be done is to have a carrot and stick approach, such that if you are an ad hoc staff and you compromise, your case will be taken up seriously. For example, during the November 2023 Kogi governorship election when there were cases of pre-filling of result sheets, INEC said that those who were involved in the act would be identified and dealt with; but we never heard anything about that again. So, this is the time to walk the talk.”
Ojo also urged Amupitan to revisit the issue of economic shutdown during elections. “Why do we have to shut down the economy? Why do we have to restrict movement?” he asked. “It does not make sense. Restriction of movement is impacting negatively on voter turnout. When you restrict movement, somebody who registered to vote at his place of work cannot go out to vote. And you will be saying there is poor voter turnout. We need to start looking at best practices in the conduct of elections. Also, we need early voting for people who will be on election duty. This is within the precincts of what the National Assembly should do.”
He charged the INEC boss to be firm and rebuff external pressure from the political class.
“The political class will try to influence you but if you are able to ward off their influence, you will be able to be firm and do what you have to do as an impartial umpire. So, he needs to be firm and where he has made a promise that cannot be fulfilled; he has to come out clean.
“Part of the challenge INEC had under Mahmood Yakubu was that when the glitch that was said to have happened in uploading the 2023 presidential election results occurred, they kept quiet for two days, which gave room for speculation. Lack of proper and timely communication led many people to believe that they actually fixed that election for the ruling party. So, Amupitan must learn to come out clean to the stakeholders even when they are having issues. If there is no prompt communication, you are allowing for misinformation, disinformation and all manner of rumours that will discredit your best effort at conducting credible elections,” he advised.
Elder statesman, Chief Chekwas Okorie, believes the Anambra governorship election would test Amupitan’s resolve to bequeath a culture of free and fair elections to Nigerians.
Okorie, who is the Founder of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and a former presidential candidate, said the INEC chairman has been saying the right things that people would wish to hear regarding his determination to deliver a free and fair election since he was sworn in. He, however, noted that he would like to see the conduct of Anambra election truly free and fair.
“To achieve that, all those usual excuses of logistics hiccup that made some people not to start voting until afternoon and some people voting in the night should not reoccur. I would also like to see the transmission of results to the IReV done as soon as the ballots are counted in the presence of voters. This will ensure that whatever transpires at the collation centres will not in any way differ from the totality of the polling station results as announced and transmitted,” he said.
Okorie, however, observed that there are aspects of election the INEC chairman cannot guarantee. He particularly pointed to vote buying, describing it as a very disturbing development in Nigeria’s electoral system, which is getting worse by every election cycle.
“So, I would like the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to be very definite in his directives and make it public that any person that is caught buying votes should be immediately arrested and prosecuted. I say this because we had an experience in 2017 when Osita Chidoka was the governorship candidate of UPP in Anambra State. People were buying votes all over the polling units in the state. And it turned out that the security agents, especially the police, had a rehearsed answer to give to anyone that complained. Their response to our complaints was that they did not come to Anambra to catch people who are buying votes but to maintain peace and order. They even went further to tell us that if we had money we should come and buy votes as they would not disturb us. For the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) to be seen to be complicit in a criminal activity during elections leaves a lot to be desired.”
Okorie accused the 10th National Assembly of being lackadaisical towards facilitating the passage of the necessary reforms that will address some critical issues that bug Nigeria’s election, but urged Amupitan to drive the reforms.
“Some of these reforms will include electronic voting, which will exclude collation of results at the local council level. It is at these collation points that election results are manipulated. When you vote at the polling unit, the result should be transmitted to IReV, and people watching from Nigeria or outside Nigeria will have the opportunity to monitor the results as they are coming. That is number one.
“Number two is that we should hold all our elections in one day. We have the technological infrastructure to hold our elections the same day. Our voters’ card is electronic, the voters’ register is electronic; we have BIVAS and IReV. These things are already there. Internet penetration in Nigeria is beyond 95 per cent. So, there is nothing that will make us have excuses that this election has successfully taken place while the other election suffered a glitch.
“Another legal framework I would like to see is that electronic transmission of results should be mandatory. The law should cover it so that courts will stop ruling that the law does not cover it. There should be no room for manual computation of results. And wherever there is any glitch, the election should be re-conducted. For now, these can help the conduct of our elections. However, going forward, one would like to see where one can vote with his or her smartphone without necessarily going to the polling unit,” he said.
With just 16 days in office, Amupitan’s tenure has barely begun. However, there is no doubt that how he tackles some of these issues will come into play when his stewardship will be put on scale in the end.
