Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2023 general election, has pulled out of the presidential debate scheduled to hold today.

The open debate organised by the Center for Democracy and Development (CDD) and to be aired by Arise TV was put together so Nigerians could hear from frontline presidential candidates ahead of the February 2023 election.

According to an initial flier put out by the organisers, Tinubu, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Rabi’u Kwankwaso were all invited to the debate.

However, Tinubu’s photo was replaced with that of Kola Abiola of the People’s Redemption Party in a subsequent flier. FIJ also observed that Tinubu was not at the venue of the debate, which began some minutes ago.

CDD, in a press statement released on Sunday and signed by Idayat Hassan, its director, stated that the presidential candidates were invited based on a poll where citizens were asked to vote for presidential aspirants they would love to hear speak.

“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,” the statement reads.

“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.”