Leading presidential candidates are set to engage in a debate organised by a pro-democracy think tank, the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD).
In a statement issued on Sunday by the CDD Director, Idayat Hassan, the debate would afford the presidential candidates the opportunity to share their plans for the country.
She said the first of the sessions would take place today, November 6, and would air on Arise Television and on its YouTube and social media channels.
Hassan stated that the candidates invited for the debate are Bola Tinubu (All Progressives Congress); Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party); Peter Obi (Labour Party), and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso (New Nigeria Peoples Party).
She added that the debate would also allow the presidential candidates to convince Nigerians that they can solve the numerous challenges facing the country.
According to her, the CDD, ahead of the 2023 elections, identified the need to ensure citizens heard from the presidential candidates.
She said the debate follows the Centre’s constant campaign to ensure that the parties and candidates conduct issue-based campaigns.
Process Of Selecting Candidates
Justifying the reason for inviting only the four candidates, Hassan said the process for selecting the invited candidates was through a survey.
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.”
