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From Gyang Bere, Jos
The Country Director of Equity International Initiative, Amb. Chris Iyama said they have set up Citizens Observers HUB and Data center for the purpose of tracking votes, particularly young Nigerians who registered to participate in the General Elections.
He explained that the Citizens Observers HUB has data analyst across the six geo-political zones of the country, who would be working in synergy with their partners across all electoral polling units.
Iyama disclosed this during a press briefing in Jos and said 37,060,399 young Nigerians between the age of 18-34 would be participating; 17,700,270 elderly persons between the age of 50-69 and 33,413,591 meddle age persons between 35-49 years while old persons stand for 5,294,748 from 70 years above.
He said, “This is the citizens Observers HUB 2023 where we are going to be tracking the votes of Nigerians, the vote of young people, the vote of the elderly, the vote of people living with disability across age groups.
“We are going to be tracking election violence, we are going to be tracking we are going to be tracking the security men and their conduct, we are going to be tracking the time the election martials arrived the polling units.
“We are going to be tracking different activities that has to do with the credibility of the election. 2023 election is very important and crucial election in the history of our country.
“For the first time, we are witnessing a large percent of youth voter turnout across the country and we know what we did last year and January this year when we encouraged young people to come out and register and to get their PVCs.
“Fe single handedly mobilize over N15 million young voters the federation and that was more successful through the help of media houses across the country. We conducted alot of citizens engagement, training of security personnels, training of young people, we had series of town hall engagement meetings with civil society practitioners, we meet with INEC, we engaged different age groups in the 777 local governments in this country preaching the message of peace, encouraging young people to participate in the election.”
He expressed joy that the country has not witnessed pre-election incidence like what happened in 215 and 2019 and said that was as a result of increased voter education campaign across the country.
He explained that the Citizens Observers HUB and Data center for the 2023 election would be visited by critical stakeholders in the electoral process such as the police, INEC, civil society organizations among others.
Iyama said that international observers from the European Union, United States, ECOWAS mission in Nigeria, we had the African Union, civil society organizations, different media outfits among others visited the Citizens Observers HUB on 2019, saying more of these organizations would visit for the 2023 elections.
“Sited in this hall are 25 data class, they are data analyst representing the six geo-political zones of the country, saying each set has a designated places to be tracking during the elections.
“They are going to be working together with our observers across the entire polling units in the country, they will be giving feedbacks from different polling units and we will be tracking every process that concerned the election.” He stated.
