Nigeria Content Online

Aisha Oyebode, daughter of former head of state, Murtala Muhammed,
speaks on the presidential policy dialogue, which holds in Abuja from
March 8th to 9th, 2011.

What is the presidential dialogue all about?

The presidential
dialogue is in response to the national move for issue-based politics
and what we are trying to do is to create the opportunity for
deliberation and dialogue. It is going to be between the presidential
candidates and a representative sample of the Nigerian populace. What
we are trying to do is to deepen our democratic and developmental
journey so that the voters have the basis for making an informed choice
about the parties and the candidates in the coming elections.

It is also a way
of facilitating the development of national consensus on key
developmental issues and reforms. The focus is on public policy issues.
It is on issues that impact our development. So we are going to look at
different key sectors areas such as economic growth; infrastructure
development such as roads, electricity; issues of accountability and
transparency and governance. We are looking at public sector capacity,
homeland security, teachers’ quality improvement, basic education and
so on.

How different is the dialogue from the presidential debates organised in the past?

It is a one-on-one
dialogue. Each presidential candidate will have their own exclusive
session with the panelists who are public sector analysts and the
panelists will raise some questions with them, look at their manifesto,
look at the policy statements. So it is based on all of the issues that
plague us that we are then going to raise and ask them questions about
and they will be expected to respond to those questions.

So because it is
an exclusive session it provides the candidates and even the citizens
opportunity to engage deeply on key national challenges and priorities.
For us, our focus is really on policy issues. It will also ensure that
the candidates themselves are comfortable; the questions are going to
be very sophisticated; a lot of work, a lot of thinking ought to have
gone into those questions. What we are hoping to extract out of the
questions is how we are going to solve some of the issues that plague
the nation and to facilitate nation-building.