EU Strengthens Election Watch Ahead Of Nigeria’s Polls

The European Union (EU) has strengthened its support for citizen-led election observation in Nigeria ahead of the 2027 general elections under its Support to Democratic Governance in Nigeria (EU-SDGN) Programme.

The support forms part of a broader effort to strengthen domestic election observation and enable the citizens to independently observe and assess key aspects of the electoral process across the country.

Central to this effort is the Election Observation Hub, which has been used during three off-cycle elections and will now be deployed for the fourth time, on a national scale, ahead of the 2027 general elections.

The hub provides a platform for coordination, information sharing and analysis among citizen-led domestic observation initiatives. Through the hub, a wider nationwide citizen-led domestic observation exercise will be undertaken, with the final number of observers to be confirmed as preparations progress.

As part of ongoing preparations, more than 3,000 election observers and 774 long-term observers are planned for deployment across Nigeria’s local government areas under one of the observation initiatives supported through the programme.

A two-day national training for state focal persons and trainers has also been held in Abuja, covering the WatchingTheVote (WTV) Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) methodology, pre-election observation and observer recruitment.

At the training, the executive director of Yiaga Africa, Samson Itodo, said the exercise was designed to strengthen the capacity of state focal persons, who will cascade the training to observers across the 36 states of the federation.

Itodo described election observation as a systematic and technical exercise requiring sustained investment in capacity building, with more than 130 training sessions planned ahead of the 2027 elections.

Under the EU-supported initiative, 774 local government supervisors will also serve as long-term observers, tracking political developments, party campaigns, preparations by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), voter education activities, electoral violence and other developments at the grassroots.

Highlighting the importance of observing the entire electoral cycle rather than election day alone, Itodo said the integrity of the processes leading up to an election has a direct bearing on public confidence in its outcome.

“A compromised process cannot produce a credible outcome. Only a credible process can produce a credible outcome, but compromised processes always produce compromised outcomes,” he said.
Director of Programmes at Yiaga Africa, Cynthia Mbamalu, said the training marked the beginning of preparations for national deployment for the 2027 elections.

She explained that the violence-monitoring component would serve as an early-warning mechanism, tracking incidents at local government level and sharing findings with relevant security agencies to support preventive action.

Mbamalu also emphasised transparency in the management and verification of election results, noting that citizens, the media and other stakeholders should be able to understand how results move from polling units through the collation and results-management processes.