E-X-P-O-S-E-D-! How Tinubu’s newly appointed INEC Chairman wrote legal brief with which US branded Nigeria Christian-killer country – Media Report
By KEMI KASUMU and OUR REPORTERS
All of these were said as contained in the SaharaReporters report by Amupitan, who is today Tinubu’s best man for the top job of INEC Chairman, thus already rubbing on the integrity of the 2027 elections he has been placed to conduct, considering the alleged claims in certain quarters that Tinubu, assisted by his pastor wife, has settled for a partnership with Christian community to have a re-election in 2027 and whittle the influence of majority Muslim votes spareheaded by Northern Nigeria, which brought him to power in 2023.
Amidst global uproar over US President Donald Trump’s threat to attack Nigeria under the pretext of defending Christians in the country from being further victims of genocide, emerging facts have revealed on how the man President Bola Ahmed Tinubu recently threw on National Council of State and confirmed by a Senate believed to be his rubber stamp as Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, is the very cause of what has today drifted the same Nigeria he has been appointed to grow through elections management unto complicated situation, with possible eruption of religious war.
In an exclusive report published on Thursday November 6, 2025, Nigeria-based investigative medium, SaharaReporters, and titled “Tinubu’s Newly Appointed INEC Chairman Prof Amupitan Wrote Legal Brief In 2020 Report Confirming Genocidal Killings In Nigeria”, Amupitan – apparently acting in favour of Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)’s international campaigns to discredit Muhammadu Buhari, who they called Fulani and Islamic president at the time – was revealed to have authored a legal brief in a 2020 report that explicitly described alleged mass killings and violent campaigns in Nigeria as acts of genocide.
According to the media report titled “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter” obtained on Thursday, the Senior Advocate of Nigeria, in his legal brief, called for urgent international intervention to stop what he termed “pogrom and attacks against the Christians and minority groups in Nigeria.”
The article of Amupitan, recently appointed by President Bola Tinubu to head the country’s electoral commission, is titled “Legal Brief: Genocide in Nigeria – The Implications for the International Community,” the publication stated.
SaharaReporters revealed that the complete report was published by The International Committee on Nigeria (ICON), a consortium of Nigerians and global advocates for human rights and religious freedom.
The document, signed under his law firm — “Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan (SAN) & Co. Legal Practitioners & Corporate Consultants”, bears the firm’s Jos and Abuja addresses, confirming his authorship long before his appointment by President Bola Tinubu.
In the paper, Amupitan declared that “it is a notorious fact that there is perpetration of crimes under international law in Nigeria, particularly crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.”
He lamented what he described as the government’s failure to prosecute offenders and protect minority citizens, warning that Nigeria risked repeating “the Rwandan and Sudanese mistakes” where the world stood by as ethnic massacres unfolded.
“While the country is trying to manage the concerns engendered by the clamour for self-determination,” he wrote, “two violent extremist groups have emerged to exacerbate an already deteriorating situation… Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen, responsible for an orgy of bloodbath and massive displacements in many States across Nigeria.”
He noted that although Boko Haram had been formally designated a terrorist organisation in 2013, the Fulani herdsmen — whom he directly accused of orchestrating widespread massacres — had not been officially recognized as terrorists, but rather “labelled a terrorist group.”
Amupitan’s legal analysis went beyond mere condemnation.
He accused the Nigerian government of constitutional failure, asserting that the neglect of the state to prosecute alleged perpetrators had made international intervention “a moral and legal necessity.”
“The victims of the crises are mainly the Christian population and the minority ethnic groups in Nigeria,” the brief stated, “and hence the need for remedial actions under the international law.”
He stressed that the “basis of intervention” was the government’s “neglect of its constitutional responsibility to provide welfare and security for the citizenry being the primary purpose of government.”
Tracing the historical roots of Nigeria’s ethno-religious conflicts, Amupitan wrote that the “drive for Islamisation of Nigeria through the jihad of 1804” had now reappeared through modern extremist movements. He described the Fulani-led jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio as a “full-blown Islamization agenda”, arguing that the same ideological undercurrent still drives much of the current violence in northern Nigeria.
“Following the 19th century jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio,” he explained, “the Hausa territories were conquered and the Sokoto Caliphate established… The success of the jihad was one of the religious triumphalism that aimed at expanding the caliphate to other parts of Nigeria in the irrevocable bid to dip the Quran into the Atlantic Ocean in Lagos.”
Amupitan linked that legacy to Nigeria’s modern-day insecurity, asserting that “the caliphate thereafter became a dominant force in the north,” and that subsequent governments had continued to protect its influence through political manipulation and systemic favoritism.
The legal brief also accused Nigerian authorities of deliberately avoiding the term “genocide” to escape international accountability:
“States are skeptical of naming ‘genocide’ the way it is to avoid committing resources to stop it and to punish perpetrators,” he wrote. “Such States easily find cover under the principle of complementarity… Concealing genocide becomes a strategy to guard sovereignty and protect ego, at the expense of innocent lives.”
He added that “there is nothing as devastating as losing a group whose identity enjoys some specificity, uniqueness, and permanency that can neither be replaced nor easily replaceable.”
Prof. Amupitan concluded his paper by making a direct appeal to the United Nations and global powers to intervene in Nigeria’s crisis:
“The alleged involvement of the State and non-State actors in the commission of crimes under international law in Nigeria has complicated an already complex situation,” he wrote. “Consequently, the situation beckons the urgent need for a neutral and impartial third-party intervention, especially the UN and its key organs, the military and economic superpowers.”
He emphasised that international law supersedes absolute state sovereignty in cases of genocide and crimes against humanity, writing:
“In a globalised world, State sovereignty diminishes to accommodate the common interests of the global community concretised by a mixture of consent, consensus and compelling norms.”
All of these were said as contained in the SaharaReporters report by Amupitan, who is today Tinubu’s best man for the top job of INEC Chairman, thus already rubbing on the integrity of the 2027 elections he has been placed to conduct, considering the alleged claims in certain quarters that Tinubu, assisted by his pastor wife, has settled for a partnership with Christian community to have a re-election in 2027 and whittle the influence of majority Muslim votes spareheaded by Northern Nigeria, which brought him to power in 2023.
A respondent, who refused to be named, said to our reporter in Abuja Thursday night that, “We have been complaining that Tinubu plays politics not governance. That is why he played himself into this internal mess that the name of Nigeria is dragged along. As far as I am concerned, revelation of the role of Amupitan in the religious tension Buhari government faced from is a divine design by God himself to expose the plot by the same people in whose hands Nigeria has been constitutionally placed but who are using the opportunity to turn the table, politically,v thinking that will help them in 2027.
“But that plan has backfired on them now. The question I ask myself is, why does Tinubu live to play politics with everything at the expense of good governance and you still see some Nigerians come out to sing his praises? Now for those of us who have erroneous blamed US President Donald Trump, we have now seen it is political collaboration Tinubu planned with using Christianity as force of relevance in his 2027 agenda that led the country to what Trump plans to do, though Trump errs for even accepting that only Christians are being killed.”
