The Director of Strategy at the African Center for Leadership, Strategy and Development, Itia Otabor, has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and security agencies to go beyond routine assurances and ensure credible and transparent Ekiti governorship elections.
Speaking during an interview on ARISE NEWS on Friday, Otabor said the upcoming poll represents an important test of Nigeria’s electoral integrity, particularly in addressing recurring concerns around voter inducement, security, and public trust in the process.
“Every time before we have an election, we hear all of the ‘we are prepared, the election materials have been deployed, the BVAs are ready.’ We’ve heard all of these things before, but it’s time to demonstrate that beyond all of this rhetoric, we can demonstrate on election day the capacity to deliver elections that are transparent, that end up to be credible and acceptable to the people as a true and fair reflection of the will of the people on election day.
“I think security, fake news, vote buying, and all of those are major concerns. Every election that we conduct in Nigeria, we seem to go around the same issues to be the recurring decimal in all our elections; And I think that tomorrow, as this election rolls out, we stand at another critical stage where we need to demonstrate that we have moved beyond some of these things.
“One of the things that we’ve been looking at because it represents the basis for credibility and transparency is the turnout, and we’re going to be able to see whether INEC has moved the needle from the last general election. This will be a critical litmus test. And I think tomorrow Nigerians are watching Ekiti; it becomes a litmus test for the election. And that’s why we are hoping that INEC and the security agencies will rise beyond mundane issues and deliver credible elections that would speak to the minds of the people with clarity, without any ambiguity, that Nigeria is moving towards having credible elections. So I think we are all watching. We are truly watching,” he stressed.
Explaining that electoral credibility can be measured using frameworks such as the TRIBE index, Otabor said it assesses transparency, electoral environment, reforms, inclusivity, voter education, and overall conditions. He added that a pre-assessment suggests the Ekiti governorship election could achieve a moderately high credibility score of 70.
“So when you talk about credibility, it comes down to certain indices or frameworks that people use all over the world to judge credibility. For instance, at the African Center, we have what we call the TRIBE index. The T stands for transparency, the H stands for a healthy environment where elections are conducted, the R stands for reforms, the I for inclusivity, V for voter education, and then the E for the environment in which the election is held. And we have also generated 12 indicators to support that.
“It means that when you look at this framework, you can use them as a benchmark to look at any election, and then you can actually measure the level of credibility. In fact, the credibility assessment that we have done concerning Ekiti — based on all these indicators and the TRIBE index, it shows that potentially Ekiti should turn in a moderately high credible election because it has a score of 70 on our pre-assessment,” he said.
However, he stressed that while the framework provides a theoretical outlook, the real test would come on election day as the process unfolds in practice.
“But the truth is that that’s what we have done theoretically. Tomorrow, we are going to go and see how it manifests practically,” he noted.
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