On the 30th of October, 2018, the West Africa Network for Peace (WANEP) in collaboration with the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of Nigeria launched Election Violence Monitoring, Analysis & Mitigation Project (EMAM). The project is a four-month long situational monitoring, analysis and mitigation of violence during the forthcoming general elections in Nigeria scheduled for February 2019 which was launched in Abuja. EMAM is designed to support local and national response architecture that link Early Warning (EW) with informed response to prevent or mitigate identified threats capable of affecting the peaceful conduct of the Nigerian elections.
Validating indicators would be developed to inform specific monitoring and reporting of violent election threats by community monitors before, during and after elections. The representative of ECOWAS EW Directorate, Maimouna Konate said that WANEP has supported the operationalising of the ECOWAS EW mechanism. WANEP's National EWS (NEWS) managers across the region are part of the ECOWAS Field Monitoring teams that populate the ECOWARN system with real time data on a daily and weekly basis.
The Executive Director of WANEP, Dr. Chukwuemeka Eze, noted that WANEP was collaborating with ECOWAS because the responsibility of ensuring that elections in Africa are free, fair and credible cannot be shouldered by ECOWAS, the AU and the member states alone. CSOs in these countries are critical stakeholders also. I agree with this assertion. That is why in the last few weeks many of my posts on this Blog have been about how to ensure non-violence in the forth-coming elections. If we get the elections right, then the legitimacy of the winner is assured in the eyes of the electorate! The EMAM project is in furtherance of the WANEP/ECOWAS/AU partnership for peace and security in West Africa in line with the MoU. I intend to keep watching that space for further developments...
'Let a thousand flowers bloom'. We cannot have enough of this and similar initiatives aimed at preventing violence in Nigeria's elections...
P.S.
This Blog Post is adapted from the ECOWAS write-up: www.ecowas.int/wanep-ecowas-and-inec-launch-emam-project
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