First Election Monitoring Platform Launched

First Election Monitoring Platform Launched
Qasim Akinreti, Lagos

The first citizen participation and monitoring platform for Nigeria’s April elections has been launched in Lagos.

The platform called ‘Reclaim Naija Project’ was launched by the Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka.

At the launch, the Nigerian literature icon advised the political class and Nigerians generally to shun acts of political violence as elections approaches.

The Ushahidi platform
The election platform emphasises the use of special mobile phone numbers to report act of electoral malpractices.

This concept was derived from the Kenyan Ushahidi model used during the 2007 Kenyan election to monitor post election violence in the country.

The Kenyan election monitoring strategy –“Ushahidi platform” popularly referred to as “testimonies” is to be deployed for Nigerians to monitor the April polls.

Ushahidi is a tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya in post-election times. This tool enables people to report the incident seen at the polling stations to a dedicated platform.

It appears on a map-based view for others to see and for local Nigeria’s NGO’s to get information and verify each incident.

Executive Director, the Community Life Project, a non-governmental organisation in Nigeria, Ngozi Iwere, said that the uniqueness of the initiative, coming under the auspices of Reclaim Naija Project, was its ability to mobilize people in the urban and rural areas to channel their concerns and make their voices heard on the democratic process.

How it works

Under this initiative, dedicated toll free cell phone numbers would be announced to the people ahead of the forthcoming elections.

People would be encouraged to call these numbers for any electoral malpractices and other developments in the polling booths to the officials of the Community Life Project who would in turn send these across to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC and other appropriate agencies for prompt action.

According to her, the beauty of this initiative is that people can call the free toll lines, send text messages in local languages and interact with designated agencies on their complaints.

Similarly, these observations can be channeled to a website –www.reclaimniaja.net. This website is linked to Facebook and Twitter social media networks.

Williams