New INEC boss and Tinubu’s visibilization of Northern Yorubas

Everyone who is familiar with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s unabashed Yorubacentricism expected him to appoint a Yoruba person to succeed Professor Mahmood Yakubu as INEC chairman. However, because, as I pointed out in my September 20 column, no president, prime minister, or head of state has ever appointed an INEC chairman from his immediate geopolitical region, Tinubu’s Yorubacentric excesses had a restraining order.

Of course, Tinubu really doesn’t care what anybody thinks about his overt project of inaugurating and sustaining Yoruba hegemony in Nigeria’s national sphere. He could easily have appointed the next INEC chairman from the Southwest and watched with satisfied amusement as people from other regions squirmed in impotent rage.

But he had an alternative, which he seized. There are Yoruba people in northern Nigeria. Why risk needless, even if impotent, national outrage by appointing someone from Osun, his native state, or Lagos, his adopted state, when he could achieve the same Yorubacentric state capture by appointing a Yoruba person from the North? Thus, we have Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, a Yoruba man from Kogi State, as the new INEC boss.

To be fair, that was precisely what Tinubu’s predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, did. Although Mahmood Yakubu is from the Northeast and Buhari is from the Northwest, their identities are indistinct. They are both “Hausa-Fulani,” a term Buhari said he personally liked because it accurately captures the complexity of his ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identity.

Like Buhari, Yakubu traces patrilineal descent to the Fulani but is linguistically and culturally Hausa. So, the fact that they come from different so-called geopolitical zones doesn’t erase the reality that they are more or less indistinguishable in identity terms.

Just as Buhari and Yakubu are both “Hausa-Fulani” who happen to belong to different “geo-political zones,” Tinubu and Amupitan are both “Yoruba” (there are people from Kogi West such as Professor Etannibi Alemika and journalist Tunde Asaju who insist they are not Yoruba) but from different regions.

In fact, unlike Buhari and Yakubu, who share not just common ethnic and regional identities but also similar faiths, Tinubu and Amupitan do not share the same faith. Tinubu is a Muslim, while Amupitan is a Christian. Of course, as I’ve pointed out multiple times in past columns, in the South, where Tinubu is from, ethnicity is a more potent instrument of identification than religion.

It’s therefore obvious that while Amupitan is eminently qualified for this job—he is an accomplished professor of law and a revered Senior Advocate of Nigeria who has no known record of partisan political affiliations, even though a few people mistook him for Professor Taiwo Osipitan, a Tinubu lawyer in the 2023 election—the primary reason Tinubu chose him is his Yoruba identity.

However, I want to go beyond the discernible ethnic considerations that informed Tinubu’s choice of Amupitan. No true northerner should take Tinubu’s ethnic bait.

Northern Nigeria (or what some of us like to call “Lugardian northern Nigeria”) is the country’s most complex region. It is home to almost every ethnic group in Nigeria, including the three major ones. (Most people don’t know that there is a minority of Igbo people in Ado, Oju, Obi, and Okpoku local government areas of Benue State who are native to the state and speak the same Igbo dialect as people in Ebonyi State.)

As I pointed out in my February 2, 2019, column titled “Even Ahmadu Bello Would Be Ashamed of Buhari’s Arewacentricity,” being a genuinely northern sub-nationalist draws you close to being a pan-Nigerian nationalist.

I wrote: “A real, Ahmadu Bello-type northerner… would regard Yoruba people from Kwara and Kogi states as his or her ‘regional kin.’ Well, if you can do that, you might as well extend that ‘kinship’ to other Yoruba people in the Southwest in the interest of nation building.

“If you accept Ebira people in Kogi as your regional kin, you might as well extend it to the Igara in Edo State whose language is mutually intelligible with Ebira. If you regard the Idoma of Benue as your regional kin, why not do the same to the Yala in Cross River who are linguistically and culturally similar to the Idoma?

“If you regard the Igala in Kogi as your regional kin, you might as well like the ethnic kin of the Igala known as the Ebu in Oshimili North LGA of Delta State or the Ilushi in Edo State, who are linguistically and culturally indistinguishable from the Igala.

“If your benign northern sub-nationalism causes you to accept Iyiorcha Ayu as your brother because he is Tiv from Benue, why would you not accept his own brothers and sisters in Obanliku in Cross River State who are also, for all practical purposes, linguistically and culturally Tivs?”

The Yoruba people in Kwara and Kogi states have had the disadvantage of being prominent yet invisible. They tend to be distrusted by their regional kith in the North and suspected by their ethnic kin in the Southwest. That is a delicate, unenviable position to be in.

Tinubu’s pan-Yoruba ethnic project is visibilizing northern Yoruba people on the national stage in ways we are not accustomed to. In April this year, he appointed Bashir Bayo Ojulari, a Yoruba Muslim from Kwara State, as the Group Chief Executive Officer (GCEO) of NNPC Limited, Nigeria’s ultimate cash cow.

Now, he has appointed Amupitan, a Yoruba Christian from Kogi State, as the head of INEC, Nigeria’s gatekeeper of political power. One controls the flow of money; the other controls the tide of electoral mandates. That is a lot of power. That is a lot of visibilization. It reverses decades of enforced invisibility.

This may be an ethnic project for Tinubu, but if managed well, it can become an unintentional empowerment of the North—or at least the idea of the North that Sir Ahmadu Bello carefully worked to nurture when he was alive. For him, no part of the North was more northern than another.

That was why he appointed Joseph Aderibigbe, a Yoruba Christian who hailed from Erin-Ile, the last town in northern Nigeria before one crosses over to the West, as the Provincial Secretary (equivalent to a state governor) of the Sokoto Province, which comprised what is now Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi, and parts of Niger states. Bello was a councilor in Sokoto and used to joke that Aderibigbe was his “boss” in Sokoto but his subordinate in Kaduna.

When northern Nigeria’s Muslim, Hausaphone leaders mishandled Olusegun Obasanjo’s similar preference for previously invisibilized northern ethnic minorities in appointments and caused deep regional disaffection, they were compelled to form the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) in 2000 to unite the region and assuage the anxieties of minorities.

Guess who was its inaugural chairman of the board of trustees until his death in 2007? Chief Sunday Bolorunduro Awoniyi, who hailed from the same area as Amupitan.

The mistake the North would make, which would please Tinubu to no end, is to alienate these northern Yoruba appointees by calling them Yoruba while tacitly denying their northern identity.

As Colonel Abubakar Dangiwa Umar suggested in a July 1999 interview in the Weekly Trust when northern Muslim leaders had a conniption because northern Christians were visibilized by Obasanjo, I would advise northern leaders with symbolic and cultural authority to be strategic and embrace Tinubu’s appointment of northern Yorubas to consequential positions as a plus for the region, even if that is not his intention.

The alternative is to be receptive to a redrawing of the political and geographic map of Nigeria that cedes Yoruba-speaking Northern Nigeria to the West.

Perhaps what began as a parochial design might paradoxically fertilize a broader national idea. If the North embraces these appointees as its own rather than as southern implants, Tinubu’s maneuver could, ironically, advance the inclusive regional vision that Sir Ahmadu Bello once imagined. Nigeria’s fate has often turned on such unintended consequences of power.

But if northern leaders fall for the ethnic traps laid in these appointments by rejecting their own sons because of linguistic or cultural labels, they will not only vindicate Tinubu’s divisive calculations but also weaken the North’s moral claim to unity. The region’s future strength will rest on its ability to see through the politics of symbolic baiting and recognize substance where others see difference.

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