US-based professor of new journalism at the Kennesaw State University, Farooq Kperogi, has lambasted the Independent National Electoral Commission over its internal investigation that cleared its chairman, Professor Joash Amupitan, of posting partisan pro-Bola Tinubu messages on X during the 2023 election cycle, describing the exercise as a “farcical self-acquittal.”
In a post on his blog, Kperogi argued that INEC’s self-investigation lacks credibility because the commission was essentially investigating and exonerating itself.
“If na you nko? How can you fail an exam you set and graded? How can you find yourself guilty in a court you established, where both the prosecution and the defense lawyers are your appointed minions and you are the judge?” he wrote.
Kperogi listed five major alleged factual and logical flaws in INEC’s report, which he said relied on “a blizzard of deceitful phrases” without presenting evidence.
On the disputed timestamp of the “victory is sure” reply, he stated: “The claim that the timestamp of the ‘victory is sure’ reply appeared earlier than the parent post, and therefore that it is ‘physically impossible,’ ignores the fact that the parent post was edited, which altered its timestamp. The reply reflected the timestamp of the earlier version of the post before it was edited.”
He also challenged INEC’s dismissal of citizen-led account recovery evidence, noting: “Independent, citizen-led account recovery efforts on the contested X account pointed to the phone number and email address associated with Amupitan’s official CV. If password recovery prompts consistently surface a masked version of a known phone number or email, that is circumstantial evidence of linkage.”
Kperogi further criticised the commission’s reliance on the absence of Wayback Machine archives: “The ‘no archive trace before April 2026’ claim actually says nothing. The Wayback Machine does not capture every account or every change in real time. Absence from the archive is not evidence of nonexistence… Amupitan was an unknown quantity in 2023, so his reply attracted no eyeballs, which means the Wayback Machine had no reason to archive it.”
He described INEC’s interpretation of the account name change and locking as “clever by half,” arguing instead that it was clear evidence of cover-up: “The change of the account’s name and locking it from public view after the partisan tweets were discovered was damage control by an impersonator. Hahaha! That was funny… The most plausible interpretation of that action is that it is panicky, retroactive distancing by the original operator once scrutiny intensified.”
Kperogi also condemned INEC’s threat to arrest and prosecute those who exposed the posts, calling it a “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP)” designed to intimidate critics.
“When an institution under scrutiny moves quickly from denial to criminalization, it usually signals an attempt to paper over guilt,” he concluded.
The scholar maintained that all available evidence points to Amupitan as the author of the tweets he now denies.