Facts have emerged that Nigeria’s newly appointed Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Professor Joash Ojo Amupitan (SAN), authored a legal brief in a 2020 report that explicitly described alleged mass killings and violent campaigns in Nigeria as acts of genocide. The document, titled “Nigeria’s Silent Slaughter,” was published by The International Committee on Nigeria (ICON), a consortium of human rights advocates.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria, who was recently appointed by President Bola Tinubu to head the country’s electoral commission, authored the piece titled “Legal Brief: Genocide in Nigeria – The Implications for the International Community.” The paper, signed under his law firm—“Prof. Joash Ojo Amupitan (SAN) & Co. Legal Practitioners & Corporate Consultants”—declared that “it is a notorious fact that there is perpetration of crimes under international law in Nigeria, particularly crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.”
In his legal analysis, Mr Amupitan called for urgent international intervention to stop what he termed “pogrom and attacks against the Christians and minority groups in Nigeria.” He lamented the Nigerian government’s failure to prosecute offenders and protect minority citizens, warning that the country risked repeating “the Rwandan and Sudanese mistakes” where the world stood by as ethnic massacres unfolded without intervention.
The former legal practitioner’s brief identified Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen as the two violent extremist groups responsible for the “orgy of bloodbath and massive displacements” across many states in Nigeria. He noted a critical legal distinction: while Boko Haram was formally designated a terrorist organisation in 2013, the Fulani herdsmen, whom he directly accused of orchestrating widespread massacres, had only been “labelled a terrorist group” but not officially recognised as such by the government.
Professor Amupitan asserted that the Nigerian government’s constitutional failure and its neglect to prosecute alleged perpetrators had made international intervention “a moral and legal necessity.” The brief stated that the “victims of the crises are mainly the Christian population and the minority ethnic groups in Nigeria,” thereby establishing the basis for remedial actions under international law. He traced the roots of the conflict to the “drive for Islamisation of Nigeria through the jihad of 1804,” arguing that the legacy of the Fulani-led jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio—which aimed at expanding the caliphate—still drives much of the current violence in northern Nigeria.
The legal brief also accused Nigerian authorities of deliberately avoiding the term “genocide” to escape international accountability, stating that “Concealing genocide becomes a strategy to guard sovereignty and protect ego, at the expense of innocent lives.” He concluded his paper with a direct appeal to the United Nations and global powers, writing that the alleged involvement of state and non-state actors had complicated the situation, and thus “the situation beckons the urgent need for a neutral and impartial third-party intervention, especially the UN and its key organs, the military and economic superpowers,” noting that international law supersedes absolute state sovereignty in cases of genocide.
