@joashamupitan: Denial as self-inflicted wound

In the age of digital permanence, denial of social media updates never shields anyone. Every attempt to deny past updates bounces back as a self-inflicted wound. When public figures, especially those entrusted with sacred institutional roles, disown past utterances that are easily verifiable and blame shadowy hackers or impersonators, they fail to erase history. Instead, they amplify its visibility. The recent controversy surrounding Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), illustrates this with painful clarity.

His categorical repudiation of an X (formerly Twitter) account bearing his name, complete with pro-Tinubu, pro-APC tweets from March 2023, and his insistence that digital trails linking the handle to his personal email and phone number are fabrications, have successfully turned a manageable reputational bruise into a gaping credibility crisis. Far from deodorising his image, the denial has made the situation messier. It has also invited deeper scrutiny of his past and his fitness to preside over an INEC whose legitimacy rests on neutrality. Rather than denial and disowning, Amupitan would do better to logically confront his past head-on and use it to chart a path towards redemption through transparency and accountability. This was what Daniel Bwala, another lawyer and one of several spokesmen of the president, failed to do when confronted with his digital footprints in an Aljazeera interview.

The facts, as established by open-source intelligence (OSINT) and corroborated across multiple independent reports, are straightforward. They are also damning. An X account created in 2022 under the handle @joashamupitan posted partisan content supportive of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and then-presidential candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu. His notable reply to APC youth leader Dayo Israel’s announcement of polling-unit victories in an opposition stronghold simply read: “Victory is sure.” Other archived posts on @joashamupitan reportedly echoed APC sympathy, including references to Tinubu as “Asiwaju.” The account was registered using the email [email protected], the exact address listed on Amupitan’s publicly available curriculum vitae alongside his institutional email from the University of Jos, [email protected]. Recovery protocols for that Yahoo account reference a phone number given as 08035074099, which matches the phone number on both his CV and an Opay account registered in the name “Joash Ojo Amupitan.” However, after the controversy erupted, the account underwent rapid changes. It was renamed, set to private, and relabelled as a parody before a new handle appeared. These are not the ephemeral whispers of conspiracy theorists; they are persistent, cross-verifiable digital footprints that no amount of institutional statement can erase.

On April 11, 2026, Amupitan’s spokesperson, Adedayo Oketola, issued a blanket denial on his behalf. The INEC chairman, the statement said, “does not own or operate any personal account on X. He has at no time engaged in partisan commentary, nor has he ever associated himself with any political leaning or activity in his private or public capacity.” Oketola’s statement framed the entire episode as “entirely baseless, a total fabrication, and a figment of the imagination of its purveyors.” This is an obvious reference to either hackers, opposition elements, or malicious actors bent on undermining the electoral body. Allegedly!

Subsequent responses to the unfolding drama threatened legal action against the “purveyors.” However, this strategy of total denial ignores an unassailable logic of the digital age. The logic says that once data is public and corroborated by metadata, phone-linked KYC records, and email verification trails, denial will not dispel doubt. Rather, it will lead to greater suspicion of a cover-up and also negatively affect the integrity of the person involved. For this, what began as a question of past political expression has graduated into a referendum on Amupitan’s integrity and, by extension, INEC’s institutional impartiality. This is what the denial has achieved.

Therefore, Amupitan’s denial is a self-inflicted wound because it violates the first rule of crisis management in the social-media era. The rule says never lie because the internet remembers. By insisting that the account was never his, Amupitan forced his traducers to dig deeper. He has also challenged the public to choose between his word and something that has become overwhelming circumstantial online evidence. The outcome is the escalation that we have witnessed rather than the vindication he expected. It is thus not surprising that opposition political parties and civil society have now intensified calls for his resignation, with the ADC describing the denial as a “dangerous cover-up” that undermines his credibility.

The irony is that Amupitan is a lawyer and must have been versed in evidence and forensic argumentation. But he appears to flout the very principles of verifiability, which, as a professor, he may have taught his students. The continued denial may invite forensic investigation, that is, if the matter goes to the courts, where subpoenas to X, Yahoo, or Opay could decisively confirm or refute the linkages of his phone number, email addresses and other metadata details of the X account to his name.  So, the more he stonewalls this issue, the more he invites people to dig further. This may also unearth some unpleasant details that may further erode public trust in him and his INEC, which is already burdened by historical accusations of bias. If that happens, Amupitan would have successfully transformed a personal liability into one that potentially taints the 2027 electoral process even before a single ballot is cast.

The wound opened by Amupitan’s denial deepens with each attempt at deodorisation because it signals contempt for the public’s intelligence. Nigerians are not naïve. They know that everyone, including Amupitan, once held private political opinions. However, the injury here does not lie in supporting Tinubu in 2023. That was a decision which he was free to do at the time. The injury lies in pretending that those views never existed. This is more so because he occupies a role that constitutionally demands detachment. Every denial he makes and every blame on “purveyors” merely adds layers of disbelief to his image. It echoes classic public-relations disasters where officials treat citizens as gullible rather than stakeholders. The more Amupitan distances himself from the tweets, the more the narrative shifts from “Did he post them?” to “Why is he lying about it?” This is denial as self-harm. It does not protect his image; it damages it.

Amupitan can redeem his image if he moves from denial to ownership. First, he should acknowledge the account’s existence and his operation of it. Ownership of the handle and of the views held as a private citizen in 2023 would deflate the controversy. Contextually, the 2023 posts predated his new role at INEC and framing them as pre-appointment political enthusiasm, now superseded by his oath of neutrality, humanises him without excusing his partisanship. He can now use the development to commit to radical transparency in the conduct of the 2027 election. He can also convert the crisis into an asset by modelling the impartiality that INEC claimed in its statement, as well as use future public appearances and the official INEC X account to articulate a doctrine of “post-partisan duty” at the Commission. His past affiliations need not dictate his present conduct, and as such, he must resist the temptation to weaponise state machinery by pushing his official weight against his critics with threats of arrest. Such threats only reinforce perceptions of guilt. True leadership demands humility, which includes an apology for any perception of deceit, reaffirmation of commitment to free and fair elections, and an invitation to judicial or legislative oversight if doubt persists. History shows that public figures who own their contradictions and have survived worse scandals through candour emerge stronger than those who cling to unbelievable denials.

Amupitan’s predicament reminds us that in an era where every tweet, like, and email leaves an indelible trail, denial is not damage control but self-sabotage. It injures the denier, erodes institutional trust, and invites the very cynicism it seeks to suppress. For Prof. Amupitan, the path forward is not further distancing from his past but embracing it with honesty. He may win by holding himself accountable to his past and not transform a self-inflicted wound into a scar. The best he could do for himself at the moment is to prioritise truth and live by it. Alternatively, he will become an umpire whose every future decisions will be haunted by the ghost of @joashamupitan. For now, the only question is whether Amupitan will author the next chapter with integrity or let denial write it for him.