Ethiopia, Malawi to copy election monitoring from Nigeria

The Ethiopian and Malawi Electoral Commissions are considering the deployment of some aspects of the election monitoring tool of the Nigeria Election Monitoring and Support Centre (EMSC) in the management of their elections.

As an electoral early warning, monitoring, implementation and management tool, the EMSC, relying on field offices and personnel across the 36 states and the FCT, alerts the Commission to the challenges, identifies electoral risks/threats and provides real-time information on the status of an election.

INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu while speaking at a retreat on “The optimisation of the election monitoring support centre operational structure” in Keffi, Nasarawa State on Friday, said the EMSC was another contribution of the Commission and indeed Nigeria to election management in the world.

Yakubu said the EMSC in applying its tool, makes available to the Commission the necessary information in making real-time interventions to avert or mitigate potential risks or threats to an election.

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“In the build-up to the 2019 general elections, it became increasingly clear to the Commission that a coordinated early warning, monitoring, and the implementation system was necessary to track hundreds of inter-related electoral activities in the election project plan for the 2019 general elections.

“Accordingly, the Commission accepted the recommendations of the 2019 Election Project Plan Committee (EPPC) to integrate the three monitoring mechanisms of the Commission – the EMS, ERM and EOSC – into a single unit called the Election Monitoring and Support Centre (EMSC).

“As pioneers, we need to keep pushing the frontiers of this system, fortifying its strengths, addressing its challenges and expanding its reach in the conduct and management of elections. Having deployed it for the 2019 general elections, the Commission has certainly seen its advantages as well as its challenges. The advantages need to be strengthened and improved upon while resolving the anticipated challenges before the 2023 General Election which is just 560 days away”, he said.

The INEC chairman said the retreat was crucial to the EMSC as well as the Commission and urged the participants to work round the clock at the retreat to suggest novel ways of tweaking the EMSC, addressing its challenges and formulating comprehensive policy guidelines for its operation.