Some of the participants at the workshop. Photo: Abiodun Nejo. The National Peace Committee and the European Union have launched an intervention to prevent the outbreak of violence before, during and after the June 20 governorship election in Ekiti State. NPC Programmes Manager, Asabe Ndahi, said the Early Warning – Early Response Intervention was targeted at ensuring a free, fair, and credible electoral process through strengthening preventive measures against electoral violence and supporting peaceful democratic participation. Ndahi spoke in Ado Ekiti on Friday during a three-day capacity-building workshop for community observers across the 16 local government areas of the state, organised by the NPC in collaboration with the EU and executed by Kukah Centre. She said the workshop was “designed to equip the observers with practical skills to observe electoral developments, identify risk indicators, verify incidents, and report early signs of tension in their communities. “The EWER intervention is a preventive peacebuilding initiative designed to identify and respond to early signs of electoral tension before they escalate into violence. Through community-based monitoring and institutional coordination, the initiative strengthens early detection of risks and facilitates timely responses by relevant stakeholders. “The initiative also aims to strengthen collaboration among key stakeholders involved in safeguarding elections while promoting dialogue and peaceful participation in the democratic process,” Ndahi said. According to the NPC, early detection and coordinated response mechanisms are essential to addressing risks such as political thuggery, misinformation, voter intimidation and other tensions that can undermine the credibility of elections. The NPC manager said that under the EWER intervention, “the observers selected from the 16 local government areas of the state are equipped to identify early signs of electoral tension, monitor political developments at the grassroots, collect and verify incident reports, and submit timely reports through structured channels. She said that information gathered by the observers would be “transmitted to the NPC’s Election Security Information Hub, a central platform that aggregates and analyses electoral risk data”, adding that “the Hub provides evidence-based insights that support early alerts and enable coordinated responses by relevant institutions, including electoral authorities, security agencies and civil society stakeholders.” Ndahi said that the programme was designed to bridge the gap between community-level reporting and institutional action, ensuring that credible information from the grassroots could inform timely interventions to prevent escalation. She said that the initiative, apart from supporting preparations for the 2026 Ekiti election, would contribute to broader efforts to safeguard Nigeria’s electoral process. In her remarks, the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Officer for Kukah Centre, Deborah Obafemi, said that participants were selected based on their neutrality, commitment and patriotism toward advancing democracy in the country. Obafemi said, “Kukah Centre is trying to ensure that we have evidence-based monitoring conversation through a system whereby we can speak to all issues on election-related violence as well as election offence tracking. “We have been focusing our election security information hub on secondary information and the need to bridge that challenge is one of the reasons why we established this EWER initiative,” she said. The Executive Director, Gender Relevance Initiative Promotion, Mrs Rita Ilevbare, who is a participant, hailed the NPC for the intervention, describing it as a welcome development for a peaceful election. Ilevbare said, “We have been empowered and taught various modules on how to identify election security threats, how to escalate so that it will enable the appropriate stakeholders to take necessary steps to douse the tension. “The NPC is programming towards a very peaceful and credible election in Ekiti State. And like all of us know, when there is a security threat, it is very difficult for us to achieve a credible election,” she said.