Kogi guber: We’ll actualise credible, peaceful election — INEC

The National Commissioner in charge of Planning, Monitoring and Strategy Committee of Independent National Electoral Commissioner (INEC), Professor Rhoda Gumus, has said that the Commission will do its best to actualize credible and peaceful election in the Kogi governorship election.

She made this known in Lokoja over the weekend in her keynote at the ERM Sensitization Workshop organised for stakeholders ahead of the poll.

According to her, the purpose of the workshop is to create awareness, identify and discuss election risk factors with election security stakeholders, as well as CSOs and media and propose mitigation measures.

She maintained that no election is considered small because elections are complex undertakings, adding that egardless of the environments where they take place, Election Management Bodies (EMBs) face numerous risks in organizing them; either Presidential, National Assembly or State Elections.

“These risks are linked to legal, operational, technical, political, security and other aspects of electoral processes. The consequences of risk can be serious in well-established, as well as countries in transitional democracy.

“Although understanding and explaining outbreaks of election-related violence is a complex task, it has become an imperative venture. This is necessary, because it will help in predicting whether an anticipating election will turn violent, which factor may underlie or trigger violence and what can be done to prevent violence is even more difficult

“However, one way to address this problem is to empower those who have immediate responsibility to prevent and mitigate election- related violence such as election management bodies, security sector agencies etc,” she stressed.

Professor Gumus posited that Kogi State has become one state to conduct an off- cycle governorship election as a result of judicial pronouncement issues, however, “there is history of violence prone areas identified in previous years, and still trending, especially in conflict- affected communities which need close attention.

She promised that despite all these challenges, the Commission will do its best to actualize credible and peaceful elections, depending on the role all stakeholders would play in achieving this goal.

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