President Goodluck Jonathan’s three main rivals in next April’s presidential poll said Thursday said they would boycott a planned television debate with him this weekend after he had spurned an earlier one with them about a week ago.
Jonathan on Friday boycotted the nation’s first presidential debate, organised by the private Lagos-based television station NN24, ahead of the election, in which the rivals promised to fight corruption and the squandering of resources.
“We state without ambiguity that our principals will not honour any debate session with President Goodluck Jonathan in the 2011 elections as he has arrogantly shunned the credible debate for which we made ourselves available,” the candidates’ parties said in a joint statement.
“The PDP (Peoples Democratic Party, the nation’s ruling party), has a record of shunning every presidential debate since 1999,” said the statement, signed by spokesmen of the three opposition parties.
The statement claimed that a representative of Jonathan had agreed to the March 18 debate in which Jonathan’s three main rivals — Muhammadu Buhari, a former head of state, Nuhu Ribadu, ex-boss of the anti-graft agency EFCC, and Ibrahim Shekarau, governor of Kano, Nigeria’s most populous state, in the north — participated.
Jonathan’s office said in an official statement early last week that he would feature only in a debate organised by the Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON), which it said had been the “traditional platform” for such debates.
BON is a coalition of mostly state-run broadcasting stations in Nigeria.
“We are highly suspicious of the celebrated romance with the BON debate by the President Jonathan?s camp which shunned the NN24 debate without an apology,” the statement said.
Presidential debates have since 1979 been part of election process in Nigeria.