TheCable

The African Action Congress (AAC) has demanded explanation for its exclusion from the vice-presidential and presidential debates.

AAC was missing in the list of five political parties which the Nigerian Elections Debate Group (NEDG) and the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON), organisers of the debate, released on Tuesday.

Reacting, Malcom Fabiyi, director-general of the campaign of Omoyele Sowore, presidential candidate of the party, asked the organisers to make public the criterion for selection of participating parties.

Fabiyi said parties with less influence were on the list, wondering why it which is among the “three largest parties” was excluded.

Below is a statement released by Fabiyi:

The African Action Congress has received with surprise, our exclusion from the list of parties invited by to the 2019 presidential debates.

We demand to know the criteria that was used for selecting the parties that will participate in the debates.

The AAC is one of the three largest parties in Nigeria. In fact, we were within the top three parties in the online poll that was organized by Channels TV to determine the participants in the presidential debates. We demand that the unaltered results of that poll be published.

It is unconscionable that our candidates will be left out of the VP and Presidential debates when smaller political parties that fared worse in the polls, and do not have the reach or strength that our party commands across the country, were included.

We also note that our presidential candidate has won every major independent and objective poll against the candidates from the alternative parties. Yet somehow, those parties made it to the debates while our candidates did not.

We demand that NEDG and BON publicly declare the criteria that were used for selecting the participants. Any debate about Nigeria’s future and the 2019 elections that does not include the AAC is a farce. Nigerians cannot be fooled.

We expect that this grave injustice will be rectified immediately, ahead of the VP debates on December 14th.

Nigerians must not be cheated out of a robust debate about our nation’s future.

Nigeria MUST progress.