Yiaga Africa tasks political parties on deployment of agents

Yiaga Africa, a civil society organisation has tasked political parties in the country to take responsibility and deploy party agents to polling units during elections to ensure credibility of results.

Samson Itodo, Executive Director, Yiaga Africa gave this charge on Wednesday in Abuja during the release of its Preliminary Report of the 2024 Ghana General Election held on Dec.7.

Recall that Yiaga Africa deployed a 12-man Election Study and Observation Mission (ESOM) from Dec.3 to Dec.10 to understudy the electoral governance architecture especially in election results management.

While responding to questions on lessons learnt from the elections, Itodo said the deployment of party agents was key to ensuring that no party was short changed.

“Our Nigerian parties must come to realise that participating in elections requires a lot of responsibility.

“You have to deploy party agents; you need eyes in all the polling units because for the parties in Ghana to perform the kind of responsibility they did was contingent on the fact that they had a spread of agents across all polling units.

“They were training people; in fact one of the parties recruited over 1,500 Ad-hoc officials, trained them for a period of one year and deployed them for the elections.

“So elections are a serious business especially if you want to provide oversight on the election management body.”

Speaking further on lessons learnt from Ghana on how to achieve a credible, transparent and controversy-free election, Itodo said the electoral officers must inspire public trust and confidence.

He called on the appointing authorities to uphold the constitution in major appointments like that of the resident electoral officers.

According to him, there are two conditions: they must be individuals that are non-partisan and of unquestionable integrity.

“We have also been advocating that those conditions are not enough, you need competence, you need diversity of skill sets on INEC’s leadership.

“Also the level of due diligence must be performed when those appointments are made,” Itodo said.

Also speaking at the event, Sen. Abiodun Alli, Chairman, Nigerian Senate Committee on INEC and Electoral Matters, stressed that for the country to improve in its elections everyone must trust the system and play by the rules.

Alli responding on the issue of cross carpeting by politicians said this was not limited to Nigeria but that it is prevalent because of the lack of identifiable ideology of the political parties and the lack of internal democracy of the parties.

On his part, Mr Afam Osigwe, President, Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), said the issue would not stop if Presiding Officers refused to carry out their duty because the constitution forbids it.

Osigwe charged the Presiding Officers in the National Assembly to carry out their constitutional duties when the stipulated conditions for changing parties are not met by declaring that persons seat vacant.

Dr Aisha Abdullahi, Chair, ESOM Delegation to Ghana, highlighted some findings that made Ghana experience a success one of which is transparency and responsiveness in election administration.

Other measures she added include proactive measures like cleaning the voter register, issuing copies to political parties, involving party representatives in ballot printing, among others.

Abdullahi said ESOM therefore made the following recommendations:

“African election management bodies: Election management Bodies should review the format of ballot papers used in elections to include photographs and names of candidates to improve the quality of electoral preferences.

“Commit to greater transparency through proactive disclosure of election information, including integrating political party representatives, civil society, and media in election procurement processes.

“Leverage technology and adopt the ethical use of artificial intelligence to enhance the integrity of voter register, voter authentication, election results collation processes.”

To Political parties and candidates, they called on stakeholders to demonstrate a firm commitment to democracy by upholding national values such as patriotism, integrity and public interest in electoral politics.

ESOM urged the National Assembly to amend the necessary electoral legal frameworks to introduce prisoners’ voting and special voting for eligible voters performing essential election duties ensuring their constitutional right to vote is upheld.

They also recommended the establishment of a mechanism to routinely review elections in an open, consensus-driven manner upon completion, ensuring that actionable recommendations for reforms are identified and implemented.