Sixty individuals drawn from across the 21 Local Government Areas of Anambra State, as well as select media practitioners, have been successfully trained to monitor election violence during the Anambra 2025 Governorship Election.
The training, tagged a two-day Nigeria Election Violence Education and Resolution, NEVER monitors training commenced on Wednesday and elapsed on Thursday.
It was organized by the Kimpact Development Initiative, KDI, with support from its partners, including the UK International Development.
The participants include social change advocates and stakeholders from the local government areas (LGAs) being trained, with two representatives from each LGA serving as long-term monitors. Additionally, media practitioners from select media outlets are being trained as media monitors to track political campaign financing.
The monitors are to follow through the pre-election, actual election, and post-election period, tracking, documenting, and mitigating security situations, with the aim of achieving peace in the state.
The Executive Director of Kimpact Development Initiative, Bukola Idowu said the training became necessary as a result of gaps identified by the organization during the 2021 Governorship Election, especially in the area of low voter turnout.
According to him, the NEVER project, which started in 2019, has been implemented in the Edo and Ondo off-cycle elections and yielded meaningful results in providing security agencies and other critical stakeholders with the data to mitigate election violence.
“We were here in the last governorship election, and it was quite interesting because that election had the lowest turnout of voters for any governorship election in the country, due to insecurity.
“We do not want to have that kind of election again because it is a waste of resources. INEC made provision for the over 2.5 million registered voters in the state, and we had less than 300,000. And because the low voters’ turnout was due to insecurity, we strategically brought this initiative to look at how we can mitigate election violence and violence that can happen during the election period in time, because the election is still in November. When the atmosphere is peaceful, people will come out to participate.
“Also, we are carrying the security agencies along, and the data these monitors will be garnering will be sent to them for prompt action,” he said.
Idowu urged the monitors to be factual and not fabricate stories, revealing that the NEVER initiative is scientific and evidence-based and will be reviewed by experts.
The KDI Head, Research and Strategy, Oluwafemi Adebayo , emphasized that the level of the people’s understanding of elections and electoral processes in Nigeria, determines their level of participation in the process
He noted that to improve the people’s appreciation of laws governing the electoral process in Nigeria, the organization had developed a platform, ‘NaijaElections’ to provide reliable information and answers to election questions and Nigeria’s democracy.
Adebayo said, “It was borne out of the need to ensure that young people and electoral stakeholders have a tool from a one-stop platform, that could answer all the electoral questions and history in Nigeria.
“We understand that this is the period of AI, and there is a need for it to be used positively for the process of the election. So, we deployed it to voter education, where it could be used to simplify the bulky documents of the Nigerian Constitution, the Electoral Act, and the electoral guidelines.
“The basic idea is to curb misinformation and disinformation and make sure that people are able to have information in a simplified manner.
“The platform has accessibility features such as text-to-speech and speech-to-text, the light and dark mode, language accessibility, storytelling features, among others.”
On her part, the State Team lead monitor, Ugochi Freeman explained that the engagement of the monitors is targeted to provide a survey on security risk assessment, which the security agencies would be aware of, that may mar the electioneering campaigns and the election proper.
She expressed satisfaction that the training provided each monitor with the right knowledge to know what to look out for when monitoring.
On their part, some of the trained monitors, Ikechukwu Iheagwazi from Ihiala and Chidubem Nwachinemere from Anaocha LGA applauded the training as packed with carefully-packaged modules, which they said have greatly impacted their understanding of the various aspects of election and election monitoring.
They vowed to give their best in the discharge of the task assigned to them, for the good of the state.
