Election observer group Yiaga Africa has urged Nigeria to go beyond holding “relatively peaceful” elections and focus on building processes that inspire greater public trust and confidence in the electoral system.
Yiaga Africa’s Programme Director, Cynthia Mbamalu, speaking on Monday, noted that while the recent by-elections were generally calm, there were isolated cases of disruptions.
“Overall, it was a relatively peaceful process except for some constituencies in some states where there were issues of thugs trying to disrupt the process at some polling units. We need to move beyond just having a relatively peaceful process to a process that can inspire trust in the system,” she said.
Mbamalu stressed that result management remained a major concern despite being included in INEC’s guidelines.
“One major challenge we are beginning to have and experience is the process of result management process,” she explained.
“The truth is, the electoral commission had in its guidelines provided for result management that the process of electronic collation is also still part of the election guidelines,” she added.
She further pointed out that decisions on overvoting and ballot cancellations continue to create confusion.
“A lot of work has gone into trying to strengthen the process, strengthen INEC’s independence, get voters to care enough to show up and to vote, but it’s almost like the more work you do to strengthen the process to advance democratic principle the greater our political class deploys to undermine the effort,” Mbamalu said.
