The Presidency has dismissed attempts by leaders of the African Democratic Congress to question the competence of the Independent National Electoral Commission Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan, saying the electoral umpire’s credentials speak for themselves.
President Bola Tinubu’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Temitope Ajayi, said Amupitan stood at the peak of both his academic and professional careers, and needed no lectures from opposition figures.
Ajayi, who stated this in a post on X on Thursday, was responding to a press conference held by the ADC Interim National Chairman, David Mark, alongside the party’s National Secretary, Rauf Aregbesola, and spokesman, Bolaji Abdullahi, during which they demanded Amupitan’s resignation and urged Tinubu to sack him.
The trio had accused the INEC chair of being incapable of conducting credible elections in Nigeria.
But Ajayi pushed back sharply, insisting the ADC leaders were in no position to school a professor of law and Senior Advocate of Nigeria on electoral duties or legal principles.
“We all can at least agree that the INEC chairman is at the top of his career academically and professionally a teacher of law, Professor of law and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria,” he wrote.
He added that Amupitan certainly understood what the Latin legal maxim “status quo ante bellum” meant a term he said Mark, Aregbesola and Abdullahi could not explain to him.
Ajayi further described the ADC’s attack on Amupitan as a political deflection, saying the party was making its internal crisis a problem for others.
“It is bad politics for ADC people to make their own internal crisis of choice a problem of Professor Amupitan, that of President Tinubu and APC,” he stated.
