By Richard Akintade, Osogbo
As the governorship election is approaching in Osun State, an election monitoring group, YIAGA Africa, has said that it would deploy about 562 election observers to monitor the post-election processes in all the 30 local government areas of the state.
A board member of the group, Mr Ezenwa Nwagwu made this known while speaking during a Watch The Vote (WTV) Media Dialogue Round Table Discussion for print and broadcast journalists, in Osogbo.
Nwagwu, urged the stakeholders that would be participating in the election to come together to ensure a peaceful, inclusive, transparent, credible and fair election.
He said that the group was not interested in any of the candidates but was after a credible, peaceful and inclusive election that everyone would be proud of.
According to Nwagwu, in spite of the challenges being faced by Nigeria’s democracy, democracy remained the best form of government and must be protected.
He said that the group, through its WTV, would deploy observers in pairs to representatives for random sampling of 250 polling units in all the local government areas.
“YIAGA Africa will also be using Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT), an advanced technology that leverages on statistics and technology for the observation of the process of voting, counting and tallying of election results.
“About 500 WTV polling unit observers will be deployed to observe the accreditation, voting and counting processes on Election Day.
“Another 32 mobile observers will be deployed in all the 30 local government areas and they will be using their mobile phones to send observation reports to YIAGA data centre,” he said.
YIAGA board member said that the group would also deploy another 30 observers to monitor the result collation process at the local government collation centres.
According to him, the group has trained another set of 32 long term observers, who will monitor pre-election activities across the state.
He said that the long-term observers would track and report pre-election activities of INEC, National Orientation Agency (NOA), security agencies and political parties amongst others.
Nwagwu called for adequate training of journalists who would monitor the election.
In his technical presentation on election processes, Paul James, Programme Manager of the group, said that PVT would enable the group to present an accurate and comprehensive assessment of the election processes.
James said the PVT would also help the group detect, expose and deter fraud during the election as well as remove uncertainty in verifying election results.
Also speaking at the round table discussion, the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) Chairman in the state, Comrade Wasiu Ajadosu and Chairperson, Nigeria Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ) Mrs Aiyegbayo, in their address commended YIAGA for organising such a programme for their members describing it as a timely one.
They however enjoined their members to support the YIAGA in ensuring crisis free, fair and credible governorship election come July 16 in Osun.
