Yemisi Izuora
The Justice, Development and Peace Centre (JDPC) has commenced training of election monitors as part of its contribution to ensure free and fair elections in the coming general poll.
JDPC is a non-profit-making and non governmental organisation (NGO) with the mission to promote sustainable and integral human and community development through a holistic empowerment approach.
At the commencement of training for election monitors in Lagos, deputy director of the body Joe Nkamuke said the JDPC had been involved in election monitoring since 1999 and had trained and deployed over 60,000 monitors across Nigeria.
Nkamuke explained that the JDPC has been deeply involved in training and empowering election observers with the necessary skills in such a way that reports from them can stand the test of time.
“What we intend to gain is to go deep into democracy, by creating level playing ground for every one because we believe that inclusion will create better opportunity for development” he said.
The director noted that its training initiative is totally inclusive, as it involves Moslems, Youths and Physically challenged persons.
According to him, we do not concentrate on Faith alone, age but we choose observers considering many factors, the Catholic Church do not lay emphasis on Religion.
The program is structured in that line because the UNDP mandated us to include all these, in fact they gave us five modules and part of it is to train observers.
He said during the coming election, the JDPC will deploy about 36,000 monitors across the country while about 1,000 observers will be retained in Lagos state alone.