By Aoiri Obaigbo
Forget IBB, the so-called evil genius. He should wear shorts, grab a backpack, and enroll in Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s coven. Because in the grand chessboard of Nigerian politics, Tinubu isn’t just a player, nor even a puppeteer. He’s the board, the pieces, and the rule book. His moves are ruthless. Surgical. Cold-blooded. Democracy is presumed to be a delicate balance of power. But Tinubu has tilted the scale so far in his favour that what remains is an empty shell of representative governance. An illusion of choice, and a mirage of fairness. The appointment of Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan as Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is not another bureaucratic reshuffle. It is the final piece in a puzzle meticulously assembled since the day Tinubu engineered a fuel crisis at Eagle Square. Amupitan is Yoruba. From Kogi State, yes—but Yoruba nonetheless.
His identity is not incidental. It fits the pattern too perfectly to be coincidence. The Chief Justice of Nigeria. The Inspector General of Police. The Governor of the Central Bank. The Ministers of Finance, Interior, Power, Communications. Every sector that play a direct or remote role has a Yoruba helmsman. And now, the umpire of Nigeria’s electoral integrity. Some people are misdirecting us about the professor’s credentials. Hilarious. Tinubu has never picked a tool that’s not qualified. But he’s just become the first president to pick his tribesman as INEC boss. Covert.
A man from Ayetoro Gbede in Ijumu LGA, part of the Okun subgroup in Kogi State. Though geographically North-Central, his cultural and linguistic identity is unmistakably Yoruba. His appointment is not just symbolic. It extends Tinubu’s Yoruba footprint into a region traditionally seen as ethnically diverse and politically neutral. Checkmate. He also has two influential politicians from the oil-rich states. The bulldozer called Wike, and the Senate President, a loyalist so pliant he might as well be Bola’s toy boy. The first son and the first daughter have the students unions and market women pacified. This is the whole nine yards away from federal character. This is federal capture. Tinubu has not stormed Aso Rock with tanks. He has done something far more insidious. He has weaponised appointments.
Turned ethnicity into a tool of domination. Armed a fleet of keyboard mercenaries to defend his series of outrage. He has replaced the unpredictability of democracy with the cold efficiency of a patronage machine. And he has done it all under the stealth of legality. Cloaked in the language of merit. Wrapped in the flag of national reformation. The North, once his uneasy ally, now watches with growing suspicion. The Southeast, long agitating for Biafra, finds itself further exiled from the corridors of power. He has the option of offering them Mazi Kanu to undermine the threat of Peter Obi. Or even keep the political prisoner and make him an albatross around the neck of the opposition who keeps him awake late at night. The Middle Belt, diverse and complex, is being carved into ethnic fiefdoms. Preoccupied with fleeing from bandits. And the South-South? A elected governor has just been suspended like a school boy. They’ve been reduced to a cheering gallery. Rewarded with ultimately empty gestures. This is not governance. This is conquest. The conquest of what Pa Ikhide calls a vast crime scene.
Tinubu’s genius lies in his instinct for control. He understands that power is not just about winning elections, but about owning the institutions that count the votes. Interpret the laws. Enforce the rules. Control the purse. He has taken Machiavelli’s playbook and rewritten it in Yoruba language. And yet, the most chilling part is not what he has done. It’s how easily he has done it. With barely a whisper of resistance. With the media distracted. With the opposition fragmented. With civil society fatigued—or compromised. He has turned a democracy into a dynasty.
A republic into a republic of loyalists. So let us call it what it is. A slow-motion coup d’état. Tinubu has invented a whole new stratosphere of rigging, by rewriting every expectation. And unless Nigeria wakes up from this trance, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections still happen—but only one man is designed to win #nigeria #politics #Tinubu #INEC
