Amupitan owns X account, phone and email match prove it – IT expert Sesan
By Ishaya Ibrahim
The Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative, an information technology firm, has debunked the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) claim that its chairman, Joash Amupitan, never had or operated an X (formerly Twitter) handle.
A series of pro-Tinubu posts on the X account @joashamupitan — widely believed to belong to Amupitan — recently surfaced online. Curiously, the handle was immediately changed to @Sundayvibe00 and rebranded as a “parody account” after netizens unearthed old posts in which the account openly cheered President Bola Tinubu ahead of the 2023 election.
The INEC chairman has since denied ever owning an X account. However, independent scrutiny of the account’s creation details reveals that it was registered in 2022 using Amupitan’s full name, along with his verified personal email address and phone number.
On Channels Television’s Sunday Politics, IT expert Gbenga Sesan was invited to analyse the controversy. He dismissed INEC’s denial as not only false but deeply embarrassing.
According to Sesan, the confirmed use of Amupitan’s personal email and phone number to create the account he is now disowning proves it belongs to him.
“The reality is that you cannot use anyone’s email or phone number to open a Twitter account without having access to the content of that email or the messages sent to that number,” Sesan said.
He added that a hasty cover-up appears to be underway: “What I’ve also seen — and I didn’t spend a lot of time — over the last few hours I checked, and I have seen at least four accounts. So if someone is trying to cover the tracks, the person is probably well-paid and is doing a good job because now there are multiple accounts, most of them created in April, who have been verified. And when you check the history of many of these accounts, you will find that there’s a lot of confusion on what they are tweeting.”
Sesan described the episode as part of a disturbing pattern in which Nigerian public institutions rush to issue blanket denials.
“It’s very unfortunate that this continues with a trend of something going wrong in Nigeria and the public institution rushes out to say that something is not true. Because what you’ve done is you’ve now created interest by people like myself and others to go and find out if what you have said here is true or not.
“What is a fact is that an account existed. What is a fact is that an account was traced to email addresses and numbers that are associated with the current INEC chair. Does that mean he opened the account? For anyone to use your email address and your mobile number to open an account, then they have access to your email and to your mobile number.”
