{"id":350,"date":"2026-07-21T21:15:57","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/?p=350"},"modified":"2026-07-21T21:16:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:16:21","slug":"election-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/?p=350","title":{"rendered":"CSOs outline strategies to protect 2027 polls"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: left;\"><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>By Emmanuel Oloniruha<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Abuja<\/p>\n<p>Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and election experts have identified weak political parties, non-credible polling agents and poor technology management as threats to Nigeria\u2019s 2027 elections.<\/p>\n<p>The stakeholders spoke on Tuesday in Abuja at a policy dialogue convened by the Abuja School of Social and Political Thought (ASSPT).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The dialogue reviewed and strengthened a draft document titled, \u2018Nigeria 2027 Election Integrity, Citizen Participation, and Democratic Resilience Strategy\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Presenting the document, ASSPT Director, Dr Sam Amadi, said Nigeria\u2019s democratic integrity required a practical, non-partisan framework holding electoral institutions and political parties accountable.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amadi said Nigeria had recorded administrative and technological progress, but significant gaps remained in political parties\u2019 capacity to protect the electoral process.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur interest is the integrity of the election. It is more important than who wins; it is about the process,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>He said competitive elections required opposition parties capable of demanding fair regulation from electoral institutions without compromising civil society\u2019s independence.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amadi said electoral integrity could not be sustained by one institution, urging coordinated action among citizens, CSOs, political parties, media, security agencies and election management bodies.<\/p>\n<p>He described the strategy as a unified framework designed to shift civil society engagement from election-day monitoring to pre-emptive, full-cycle interventions.<\/p>\n<p>According to him, past civil society efforts often involved monitoring elections and issuing statements after electoral malpractices had already occurred.<\/p>\n<p>He said the framework was built around protecting the integrity of the vote and improving the democratic environment.<\/p>\n<p>This, he said, included ensuring votes were freely cast, accurately counted, transparently transmitted, lawfully collated and faithfully declared.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amadi said the Civil Society Situation Room would serve as the central platform for independent citizen engagement.<\/p>\n<p>He added that plans were underway to establish or strengthen State Situation Rooms across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTo hold election administrators accountable, civil society will maintain a public tracker monitoring the Independent National Electoral Commission\u2019s commitments,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>He said priority areas would include election funding, voter registration, Permanent Voter Cards, logistics and technology protocols.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>On concerns surrounding the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System and INEC Result Viewing Portal, Amadi called for clear protocols on result transmission and backend reviews.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>He also urged clarification of the legal precedence between hard-copy EC8A result forms and electronic records.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amadi said implementation would include a Citizen Townhall on the 2023 elections, enabling grassroots participants and lower-level officials to provide evidence of operational failures.<\/p>\n<p>He said the evidence would inform advocacy for electoral reforms.<\/p>\n<p>The strategy, he added, contained non-partisan support modules to strengthen internal party democracy, transparent primaries, campaign finance compliance and polling-agent training.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Amadi said the strategy was structured into four phases: institutional preparation, campaign monitoring, election-day and collation operations, and post-election learning and reform.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Prof. Vivian Madu, a visiting professor from the National Human Rights Commission, stressed grassroots accountability and credible party-agent recruitment.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Madu identified the failure of political parties to field credible agents as a major weakness in previous elections, including the 2023 general elections.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf you do not have credible agents on the field\u2014agents who cannot be compromised\u2014then you have lost the election before it ends,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>Country Director of Accountability Lab Nigeria, Mr Odeh Friday, urged citizens to properly document electoral irregularities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn many elections, citizens report incidents, but it feels like nothing happens because those incidents were not properly documented,\u201d Friday said.<\/p>\n<p>Prof. Theophilus Ndubuaku of the Nigeria Labour Congress Political Commission called for aggressive voter education to encourage citizens to vote according to their conscience.<\/p>\n<p>He said addressing hunger and poverty before the 2027 elections was essential to preventing voter inducement.<\/p>\n<p>The Chief Executive Officer of KORA 360, Onyinyechi Etusi, stressed the need for post-election accountability by the electoral commission.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Etusi urged INEC to consistently account for its performance and operational challenges.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Kosi Umeh, Programme Officer at the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre, said the centre planned to deploy a citizen-led electoral accountability tracker.<\/p>\n<p>She said the tracker would empower citizens to report incidents and monitor electoral activities in real time.\u00a0 www.primerisenews.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and election experts have identified weak political parties, non-credible polling agents and poor technology management as threats to Nigeria\u2019s 2027 elections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[276,12,277],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-elections","tag-inec","tag-asspt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/IMG_20260721_110212_994-1536x674-1.webp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/354"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/primerisenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}