The Youth Initiative For Advocay, Growth And Advancement (YIAGA) says it battle ready for the 2019 elections as its observers are prepped up and ready for action.

Project Coordinator, YIAGA Watching The Vote, Working Group, Cynthia Mbamalu in an interview with newsmen said “we will be deploying 3034 observers so we will have observers in every local government”

She said for the purpose of the election, ”We have recruited 822 long term observers, 48 for the 36 states, with some states having more than one because of their sizes and population”.

“These 822 have started working already and they will also recruit the observers for 2019.

“We have one supervisor per local government and what they do is follow up issues on political parties and their activities in their local governments and send in report, we do violence monitoring to help us feed an early warning system and to also identify what INEC is doing and share reports on INECs preparations to local governments and issues of voters education by INEC, Political parties and CSOs”.

Speaking on the sidelines of #WatchingTheVote National Launch of Parallel Vote Tabulation Mission for the 2019 general elections in Abuja on Friday, she said barely weeks to the election there are lots of planning and as an organisation they have commenced the pre-election observation and have released their first report, while the second report is to be released in the coming week.

The Youth group further called on political parties and candidates to endeavour to adopt issue based campaigns and shun every form of hate speech and inciting comments.

This they said, will go a long way in preventing violence and enhance the quality of the conversations around the elections.

They further called on INEC and other relevant stakeholders to invest more in activities targeted at promoting active and informed participation of women, youth and people with disabilities.

These includes their pre-election messaging, engagements and adhoc employment as well as general planning in order to ensure inclusion and fairness in the process she said.

So how ready are you for the elections as a Nigerian?