A total of 238 violence and 28 deaths were recorded during the 2023 general elections, a report by the election violence monitoring and mitigation group under the aegis of Kimpact Development Initiative, a civil society organisation, said on Friday.
According to KDI, while a total of 98 of the total violence occurred during the February 25 presidential election, 140 were reported during the March Governorship and State House of Assembly polls.
The Executive Director of KDI, Bukola Idowu, stated these during the public presentation of the Nigerian election violence report on the 2023 general elections in Abuja titled, “The Quest for peaceful election: The report and documentation of KDI’s 2023 general election security interventions and assessments,” prepared with support from the National Endowment for Democracy and International Republican Institute.
He said, “In total, we had like about 238 cases of election violence, which is spread across the country, and not good enough and each of them has their perpetrators and then also the victims, which we have close to 900 victims, and at the same time, reported 24 cases of electoral death.”
Idowu stressed the need for collaboration between agencies, adding that security agencies should predicate their deployment on early warning systems.
According to him, this has proven to be one of the potent ways to mitigate electoral violence based on the findings that the higher the presence of security forces in a community, the lower the number of electoral violence recorded.
He also called on the government to give zero tolerance to the illegal proliferation of arms before, during and after the elections, saying recruitment of thugs and arming of thugs played a huge contributing role in electoral violence recorded in the sample states.
Punch
