YIAGA
Bayelsa/Kogi Polls: YIAGA
YIAGA
Bayelsa/Kogi Polls: YIAGA Meets
Stakeholders
The November 16th Governorship elections in Bayelsa and Kogi
states are fast approaching and it is becoming more imperative to
advocate for peaceful and credible elections in both states. There
is need for election stakeholders to put mechanisms in place to
ensure a participatory credible and peaceful elections in the
states.
As the largest citizen movement committed to credible elections
in Nigeria, YIAGA AFRICA’s Watching The Vote (WTV) has commenced
advocacy visits to election stakeholders in both Bayelsa and Kogi
states. This is in a bid to share our election observation
deployment plan, seek stakeholder buy-in and explore areas of
collaboration as well as provide information on the pre-election
observation deployment for Bayelsa and Kogi.
The Board and Management of WTV met with the Independent
National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Resident Electoral
Commissioner (REC) in Bayelsa State, Pastor Monday Udoh Tom and
other officials of the commission in the state. The team is glad
that the REC and the elections team are receptive to our plan to
deploy Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) election observation, which
remains the gold standard for election observation across the
world.
The REC also promised to take stakeholders along while providing
information on the commission’s activities ahead of the November
16th Governorship election in the state.
Similarly, there are no credible elections without peace, and
this makes our advocacy visit to the Commissioner of Police and the
Commandant of National Security and Civil Defence Corps in Bayelsa
state very vital at this crucial point in time. The visit to
security agency enabled us analyze and share early warning systems
against security threats for immediate response ahead of the
elections.
While informed citizen participation is vital to a credible
election, we believe that not only the electoral commission has a
role to play in educating voters; other stakeholders including
religious and traditional leaders can play huge roles as
influencers to their followers in preaching the credible and
peaceful polls. In this vein, the team successfully engaged head of
Traditional Rulers Council, Pa Alfred Papapreye Diette-Spiff who
expressed his delight, while urging the team to swing into action,
report any wrong doings to the appropriate authority and help
achieve a credible process.
The team also met with the Ijaw Elders Forum who declared
readiness to work for credible election as it has already commenced
sensitization of the citizens to ensure violence-free elections. In
their words, “ we will monitor negative utterances and actions of
political actors and follow-up to ensure they are prosecuted. Thus
we will be glad to receive credible information from your violence
monitoring system, so that we can hold culprits accountable”.
Finally, we met with representatives of major political parties
in Bayelsa state including Chairman and members of the Inter-Party
Advisory Committee (IPAC). During the meeting with the political
parties, we discussed the importance of conducting transparent and
democratic political party primaries. YIAGA AFRICA also shared its
plan to observe political party primaries in a bid to provide
recommendations.
#WatchingTheVote is a comprehensive observation of the electoral
process, which includes the observation of the political party
primaries, pre-election environment in all Local government areas
and the election day observation which deploys the Parallel Vote
Tabulation (PVT). These will be adopted for the observation of the
2019 Bayelsa State Governorship Election.
Signed,
Samson Itodo
Executive Director, YIAGA AFRICA