CIVIL SOCIETY ORGANIZATIONS AND THE MONITORING OF 2007 GENERAL ELECTIONS IN ENUGU STATE: A CASE STUDY OF THE CIVIL LIBERTIES ORGANIZATION (CLO)

📄 Project Abstract

This study investigates the role of civil society organization particularly, the Civil Liberties Organization (CLO) in election monitoring with emphasis in Enugu State during the 2007 general elections. The study became imperative following the deteriorating democratic process in Nigeria. We focused our empirical verification on two key areas viz: Whether the presence of civil society organizations and other observer missions mitigate or reduce the incidence of tension, intimidation, fraud, violence and rigging during the elections. We also sought to investigate whether the presence of these observer groups strengthen voters confidence in the election as well as whether the areas duly observed or monitored by the civil liberties organization differ significantly from fraud, rigging and other electoral vices when viewed from the areas not observed. We adopted the Marxist theory of the state. We also relied on observation method of data collection and descriptive qualitative method of da...