By Abubakar Yunus
The Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) in collaboration with Arise Television is to host series of presidential town halls ahead of the 2023 general elections.
According to a statement signed and made available to journalists on Sunday by its Director, Idayat Hassan, the first of these sessions takes place Sunday and will be aired on Arise Television and on its YouTube and social media platforms.
She said , CDD and Arise identified the need to ensure citizens hear from the presidential candidates. This follows CDD’s constant campaign to ensure that the parties and candidates conduct issues-based campaigns.
She said ,”Nigerians need to hear how their future leaders plan to address the rising level of insecurity, 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.
“We are aware that there are questions surrounding the shortlisted candidates we invited to the first town hall. However, this decision was not without reasoning or a set methodology.
“To ensure ample time devoted to hearing each of the candidates, we ran a survey on Twitter from the 4th to the 10th of October, asking citizens to vote on which four parties they wanted to hear from”, Idayat said.
Speaking further, she noted that All 18 political parties were listed in alphabetical order. After the survey was closed, nine parties did not receive a vote.
She explained that the remaining nine received the following percentage of votes- African Action Congress (AAC) – 20.7%, All Progressives Congress (APC) – 86.2%, All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) – 6.9%, Labour Party (LP) – 96.6%, New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) – 51.7%, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – 82.8%, Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) – 6.9%, Social Democratic Party (SDP) – 6.9%, and Young Progressive Party (YPP) – 13.8%.
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