In recent decades, election observation, whose practitioners are called election observers, has become a notable feature of many developing democracies, such as Nigeria, where disputes over election outcomes are the norm rather than the exception. The deployment of election observers in the electoral process has also gained currency in advanced democracies, serving as a valuable addition to their democratic culture. Across Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania, election observation has become an essential component of democracy today. According to the Carter Centre (2023), elections have been observed in approximately 200 countries across all continents of the world. In essence, election observation is not merely a contrivance meant to mitigate electoral disputes in emerging democracies. Still, it has also evolved into a mechanism designed to promote transparency in the conduct of elections, thereby instilling confidence in the citizenry in their outcome. Before any state can claim to be a democratic state, its periodic elections must be free, fair, and credible. In other words, the political gladiators who win an election must be confident and proud to say and believe that they genuinely earned the victory. Those who lose must be convinced enough that they truly lost and possibly do not hesitate to congratulate the winners. However, right from the last election held in Nigeria in 1959, before its independence in 1960, the country’s electoral process had been bedevilled by allegations and counter-allegations of rigging or electoral malfeasance, such as violence, intimidation, and hooliganism, suggesting that the elections were neither free nor fair nor credible. Indeed, this was the case in the 1964 general elections and the Western regional election of 1965, which partly culminated in the collapse of the First Republic through the virulent intervention of the military. In their attempt to return power to a democratically elected government, the military governments between 1978 and 1979, and 1988 and 1993, embarked on transitional and democratisation programmes.