The foremost presidential candidate in the country and respected national leader of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu alongside three other presidential contenders in the 2023 general elections; Alhaji Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party; Peter Obi (Labour Party) and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso (New Nigeria Peoples Party) are billed to engage in a presidential debate today.
The debate is a brainchild of a pro-democracy group, the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in collaboration with Arise Television.
The group explained that the idea was to give the leading presidential candidates an avenue to present and defend their plans for the country.
As contained in a statement issued on Sunday, the Director of the CDD, Idayat Hassan, said the first of these sessions would take place today, November 6 and would air on Arise TV and on its YouTube and social media channels.
She added that the CDD, ahead of the 2023 elections, felt the need to ensure citizens hear from the presidential candidates.
“This follows CDD’s constant campaign to ensure that the parties and candidates conduct issue-based campaigns. Nigerians need to hear how their future leaders plan to address the rising level of insecurity, considerable economic challenges and the impact of foreign affairs on domestic considerations.
“This has informed our engagements around the elections, from providing fact-checking support and working with partners to provide analyses on the election security terrain,” Hassan stated.
She said the process for selecting the candidates was not without reasoning or a set methodology.
Hassan said, “To ensure ample time devoted to hearing each of the candidates, we ran a survey on Twitter from October 4 to 10, asking citizens to vote on which four parties they wanted to hear from.
“All 18 political parties were listed in alphabetical order. After the survey was closed, nine parties did not receive a vote.
“The remaining nine received the following percentage of votes- African Action Congress – 20.7 per cent, APC – 86.2 per cent, All Progressives Grand Alliance – 6.9 per cent, LP – 96.6 per cent, NNPP – 51.7 per cent, PDP– 82.8 per cent, Peoples Redemption Party – 6.9 per cent, Social Democratic Party – 6.9 per cent and Young Progressive Party – 13.8 per cent.
“The result of this survey informed our decision to invite the highest four scoring parties – LP, APC, PDP and NNPP to the town hall.
“The CDD is an independent and neutral institution and is non-partisan or linked to any political party or candidate. The methodology stated above was set before the survey was sent out to avoid any insinuation or claims of bias.
“We do not expect this to be the sole platform for candidates to engage with the electorate.”
