Use Ekiti gov’ship security template for 2023 polls – Cleen Foundation

The Election Security Support Centre (ESSC) of CLEEN Foundation has called for the adoption of the security measures for last Saturday’s governorship election in Ekiti State in future elections and the 2023 General Elections.

The Acting Executive Director, CLEEN Foundation, Ruth Olofin, made the call while presenting the post-election statement on the 2022 Ekiti governorship election in Abuja on Monday.

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According to her, the ESSC tracked, monitored, documented, escalated and followed up on security-related developments across the 16 local government areas (LGAs) of Ekiti State where its citizens observers deployed for the election.

“We also deployed the “CLEEN Mobile App” which allows our observers to report security and other related issues in their respective areas of observation. The primary data collected from the CLEEN Foundation citizen observers were complemented with credible and reliable information from other sources. The following issues are highlighted as part of our main report on the 2022 Ekiti State Governorship Election,” she said.

On the approachability of security agents, she said based on available data from CLEEN Foundation observers, 42 percent of the security personnel were ‘very approachable’, 55 percent were ‘approachable’, and 3 percent were ‘not approachable’.

Olofin said, “This is quite commendable as the governorship election in Ekiti State which was a test case for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and other critical actors and their preparations for the 2023 General Elections in Nigeria.”

She also said the ESSC observed remarkable improvement in early arrivals of security personnel to the polling units, with 97 percent of security personnel on election duty arrived at the polling units before 8:00am; and only 3 percent arrived at 9:00am or later.

“According to data from the CLEEN Foundation citizen observers, 71 percent of the polling units had three or more presence of security personnel, 19 percent of the polling units had two security personnel while 7 percent of the polling units had one security personnel and 3 percent of the polling units had no security personnel.

“Majority of the security personnel on election duty during the 2022 Ekiti Governorship Election were identifiable. We observed that a total of 94 percent wore easily identifiable name tags while 6 percent were not wearing easily identifiable name tags,” she said.

On possession of firearms at the polling unit, she said the foundation observed that in adherence to the electoral guidelines, security personnel on election duty in the polling units were unarmed and those with arms were sighted at a distance away from the polling units.