![](\"http:\/\/arewa.ng\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Oby-Ezekwesili_34.jpg\")
<\/p>\nEzekwesili said the challenge was aimed at allowing Buhari defend his achievements.<\/p>\n
In a statement she personally signed, the former Minister of Education, said the debate by proxy should not be accepted by Nigerians.<\/p>\n
She stressed that those who shy away from presenting themselves before Nigerians don\u2019t deserve to take the position of leadership.<\/p>\n
Stating that nothing less than 20 hours of debate was acceptable to a country of approximately 200 million people, Ezekwesili stressed that the debate should be split in five sessions of four hours each, or four sessions of five hours each.<\/p>\n
According to the Presidential candidate, the first debate should be held within a week of when campaign officially starts.<\/p>\n
The statement reads, \u201cIt appears that there is a conspiracy of the minority to trivialize the issue of presidential debate in a bid to exempt President Muhammadu Buhari from defending his performance and presenting his plans before the Nigerian people.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is unacceptable. The people need to know why they should vote for each of the candidates, and they need to know now.<\/p>\n
\u201cMake no mistake, the only people Nigerians want to hear from are their presidential hopefuls. Nigerians vote for presidents, and presidents are the ones who get the job done.<\/p>\n
\u201cVice Presidents will not take Nigeria out of poverty. So this is not the time to shortchange citizens with a Vice Presidential debate. Nigerians are voting for top of the ticket, not VP, and they are aware that this is what matters. Anything less than a presidential debate will be considered gross disrespect for the millions of citizens we hope to lead.\u201d\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Presidential candidate of the Allied Congress Party of Nigeria, ACPN, Oby Ezekwesili on Sunday challenged President Muhammadu Buhari to a 20-hour debate. Ezekwesili said the challenge was aimed at allowing Buhari defend his achievements. In a statement she personally signed, the former Minister of Education, said the debate by proxy should not be accepted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[1575],"class_list":["post-52485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics","tag-oby-ezekwesili"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arewa.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}