Tinubu must sack Amupitan for “genocide” hatchet job against Nigeria

Let me state this upfront. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must sack the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan. The President must take that action to affirm his own inaugural oath to “bear true allegiance” to Nigeria alone, and to “preserve, protect and defend” our constitution. Tinubu must also sack […]

Let me state this upfront. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must sack the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan. The President must take that action to affirm his own inaugural oath to “bear true allegiance” to Nigeria alone, and to “preserve, protect and defend” our constitution. Tinubu must also sack Amupitan in order to dissociate himself and the Nigerian state from the plausible treasonable action of an official he has only recently appointed to lead one of the most important tasks in Nigerian democracy.

As we all know now, Amupitan is the author of a chapter entitled “Legal Brief: Genocide in Nigeria” which is the centerpiece, the part greater than the whole, of a report titled “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter: Genocide in Nigeria and Implications for the International Community”. The report was published in 2020 by the International Committee on Nigeria (ICON), an advocacy group registered in Washington DC in 2017. Amupitan’s part-authorship of the report cannot be denied: his full name, signature, seal, and other identifying information are on it.

It is the first major report to explicitly accuse Nigeria of “genocide” and to openly call for foreign intervention. It is the first to provide the now dominant frames and idioms for describing long-standing conflicts in Nigeria as a “slaughter”, “persecution”, “genocide”, “mass murder”, etc, of Christians, which have now gained a troubling and destabilising currency in Nigerian national affairs. The report has also been cited repeatedly and strategically by various foreign interests, including some officials of the United States government, to advocate for sanctions and unilateral military action against Nigeria. The report, in short, is a root cause of the diplomatic and national security crises Nigeria has found itself since late September this year.

Over 81 pages of unverified claims, one-sided data, and emotional appeal, Amupitan makes three demonstrably false but dangerously effective claims. First, Amupitan conflates the four very different conflicts in northern Nigeria—Boko Haram insurgency, the farmer-herder conflict, the indigene-settler clashes and banditry as fingers of the same hand. That hand, he claims, is the “Islamization agenda” of the so-called “Muslim North” that he says stretches back to the Sharia declarations of the 2000s all the way to the Sokoto jihad of 1804.

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The aim of this agenda, he says, is to use Boko Haram, bandits, Fulani-herdsmen, and Muslim “settlers” in the Christian “Middle Belt” to exterminate all Nigerian Christians and other non-Muslims in the country—from the vast plains of the North to the Atlantic Ocean in the South, all of which, he claims further, amounts to a “genocide of Christians” in Nigeria. It is, therefore, legitimate, even obligatory, he argues finally, for international actors to intervene in Nigeria to protect Christians, even if they must violate Nigerian sovereignty and international law to do so. This last is the proper definition of treason in the Nigerian Constitution.

The implications of this rabid conspiracy theory—but effective political hatchet job—dressed up as a ‘legal brief” should by now be clear. Amupitan handed foreign interests a dossier on Nigeria that has now been used to attack Nigeria politically, diplomatically, rhetorically, and — who knows? —militarily. Equally important, the report has been used to mobilise influence and effort to promote a direct military attack on Nigeria by people whose real motivations could be far from what they have advertised. After all, if the task is to protect black Christians, nobody has done a worse job of it over the past 400 years than the United States.

Yet, to make his case stick, Amupitan needed to do three other things. First, he twists the official definition of genocide to his own purposes, for example, by glossing over the proof of “intent” and “systematic” destruction of one group by another “as such”, that is, just because of who the victim group are. His thesis also privileges religion as the one and only driver of each and all of these varied conflicts. He, therefore, conveniently ignores all other drivers of the conflicts like climate change, economic competition, state incapacity, the proliferation of small arms, etc, that numerous local and international reports have determined.

Most importantly, Amupitan needed to rewrite the long history of Islam in Nigeria to fit into the narrow box he had predetermined for it. First, he must know that Islam had been here for 800 years before the Sokoto Jihad of 1804. He must know that in 1804, there was scarcely a single Christian anywhere in the lands now known as Nigeria. Therefore, the Jihad could not have been devised against Christians. His “legal brief” also conveniently overlooked the thousands and thousands of Muslim victims by various armed actors in these conflicts, including those killed at checkpoints or in their homes, farms and ceremonial gatherings by Nigerian security officials in dubious “accidents” of “counter-terrorism”.

Above all, Amupitan ignores the brave efforts of hundreds of Muslims who have fought against Boko Haram and bandits, like the “Civilian Joint Task Force” in Maiduguri. He forgets the exemplary acts of several Muslim parents who handed over their own radicalised sons to the military, knowing they may never see them again, or the pains of Shekau’s mother who said conceiving him is what she regrets the most in her life. Amupitan wrote all of these people out of history and out of a report that is calculated by outsiders to throw Nigeria into confusion.

But my aim is not to refute Amupitan’s claims. My aim is to lay bare their implications for the office he now holds. Those are also three. First, keeping Amupitan in post directly means that President Tinubu agrees with and endorses his baseless claims, particularly his unjustifiable and unwarranted call for forceful foreign intervention against the Nigerian state and government. That then means President Tinubu is directly endorsing Amupitan’s plausible treason against Nigeria, especially since he has not withdrawn those views.

Secondly, if Tinubu keeps Amupitan in post, then by direct logical reasoning, one of them must be lying. Amupitan says there is a genocide of Christians in Nigeria. Tinubu and his government say there is no such thing. Keeping Amupitan in post then means that all of the government’s pushback and counter claims that there is simply no genocide of any kind in Nigeria are effectively null and void.

It means the Minister of Information and National Orientation Mohammed Idris, must be lying when he told CNN and other world media that there is no genocide in Nigeria. It means the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Yusuf Tugga was lying when he told Piers Morgan that there is no such thing in Nigeria. It means the National Security Adviser, Malam Nuhu Ribadu has only been peddling lies to U.S officials on this issue since last week. And of course, it means, President Tinubu’s own post on social media denying genocide is also a ruse.

Third, and most importantly, keeping Amupitan in post means there is no longer any line between right and wrong in Nigerian public life. My view is that anyone who has done this much damage to the Nigerian state should be nowhere near public office, at the very least until they recant and apologise to the nation. It is absolutely disgraceful that the Nigerian media, absurdly sentimental at best, has simply ignored this most serious of issues in Nigeria right now. But I have tried to lay out the facts and implications of it here as much as I can.

Amupitan cannot serve at the helm of one of Nigeria’s high offices of state by day, and still be writing dangerous dossiers to foreign interests against the same country by night. He must either choose one or apologise for the other. On this issue, President Tinubu, too, cannot be on the side of his own government officials—Ribadu, Idris, Tuggar, etc, on the one hand, while still being on the side conspiracy pushers—Ted Cruz, Riley Moore, and Joash Amupitan at the same time. Tinubu must uphold the dignity of Nigeria, and his own oath of office, and must choose between sack or apology for Amupitan. Silence here is complicity. I yield.