IPOB activities will not hinder Anambra election, says YIAGA

An independent election observer group, the Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth and Advancement (YIAGA) Africa has said the ongoing activities of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) will not pose any hindrance to the November 6 governorship election in Anambra State.

A board member of Yiaga, Ezenwa Nwagwu, who disclosed this in Awka, the state capital on Wednesday, while speaking to journalists, identified ”voluntary” voter apathy as a major threat to the election.

He said a pre-election survey conducted by the group in the state did not in any way suggest that the IPOB activities could adversely affect the election.

Nwagwu said, “There are no visible signs that suggest that insecurity would hamper the exercise.

“No winner of Anambra governorship election has ever emerged with more than 300,000 voters out of about two million registered voters in the state. So apathy is the major fear in the election, not insecurity.”

He said only those who saw elections as a political economy would always exaggerate the insecurity aspect of the exercise.

He added that the fear of security threats had always been there in the past and should be guarded against, stressing, “the major challenge is to get the Anambra electorate to come out and cast their votes.”

He said YIAGA was engaging the relevant stakeholders including the police, NSCDC, traditional rulers, the media and political parties to change the narrative of elections in the state.

Nwagwu said YIAGA would deploy 548 workers to polling units, collation centres and other layers of the process.

He urged residents of the state who had attained voting age to endeavour to register and ensure that they cast the votes on the election day.

Also speaking, a constitutional lawyer, Professor Nnamdi Aduba, another YIAGA Board member, decried what he called the docility of Nigerians towards election matters, stressing that election litigants hardly saw election observers’ findings as good evidence in times of disputes.

The YIAGA Project Manager, Mr Paul James, said the group would deploy Watching The Vote Workers to 250 of the 5,720 polling units in the state to capture the true situation on the election day in form of pilot survey.

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