A pro-democracy group, the Centre for Democracy and Development, CDD in collaboration with Arise Television will be hosting all the presidential candidates in the forthcoming 2023 general elections in a debate today (Sunday).
This was disclosed in a terse statement issued on Sunday, by the Director of the CDD, Idayat Hassan, who said that the preliminary stage of the debate will hold today, November 6 on Arise TV and on its YouTube and social media platforms.
The intention of the debate, according to the director of CDD is for the presidential candidates to address the citizens ahead of the forthcoming general elections.
The terse statement read: “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 in 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.”
She also added that the reason for the debate is “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.”
