The Referee Who Became the Match
Nigeria has a talent for turning guardians of order into symbols of disorder. The latest performance features two once-revered Senior Advocates: Mike Ozekhome and Joash Ojo Amupitan.
Start with the referee. As head of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Amupitan’s job is simple; be trusted. Instead, he is entangled in a vanishing X account that spoke like a partisan, then dissolved into denial. In Nigeria, such mysteries are less investigated than endured.
More troubling is INEC’s growing enthusiasm for interpreting court judgments rather than merely obeying them. In disputes like that of the ADC, the commission appears less like an umpire and more like a quiet participant, deciding not just outcomes, but meanings.
Then comes biography. Before elections, there was academia. Allegations, voiced bluntly by Solomon Dalung, suggest a past where results could be “arranged.” If so, the transition from managing grades to managing elections feels less like promotion and more like continuity.
Alongside him stands Ozekhome, once a thunderous defender of justice, now accused of something far less poetic; document forgery in a London property dispute. In Nigeria, moral outrage often ages badly.
Individually, these are allegations. Together, they form a pattern, the steady erosion of belief. And belief, in a democracy, is the only currency that matters.
The problem is no longer whether these men are guilty. It is whether the system they represent can still be believed.
When referees become the story, the match is already lost.
