2023: FCT Leg’ACEs hold awareness campaign for National Assembly elections in Abuja

Active Citizens Engaging the Legislature (Leg’ACEs) visit Gwagwalada Market, Abuja, to drum up awareness for the forthcoming National Assembly election in the FCT

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With about 15 days to the all-important 2023 general elections, stakeholders have continued to intensify campaigns aimed at paying the deserved attention to legislative seats, increased voter turnout and participation towards a fair and credible election on February 25 2023.

Leading the charge in this direction, a group known as Active Citizens Engaging the Legislature (Leg’ACEs) were on the streets of Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) on Monday, 6th February 2023, to drum up awareness on the need to pay attention to candidates across the various political parties running for the two House of Representatives seats and lone Senatorial seat of the FCT in the forthcoming National Assembly election.

The team led by Deborah Obiabo, Coordinator of the group in the Federal Capital Territory, met with traders, commercial motorcyclists, artisans and other eligible voters, urging them to scrutinise the promises by the candidates and come out on the 25th of February 2023 to elect their choice for the various National Assembly offices in order to contribute to the strengthening of an effective parliament in the 10th Assembly.

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Addressing the traders at Gwagwalada Market in Gwagwalada Area Council of FCT,. the Leg’ACEs Coordinator said: “Please encourage someone to vote around you today, let someone know that the National Assembly election is as important as the Presidential election, and that we should pay attention to the legislature and hold the parliamentarians to account.”

The team also promised to visit other places of interest ahead of the election in two weeks.

The Active Citizens Engaging the Legislature (Leg’ACEs) programme is an initiative of OrderPaper Nigeria; Nigeria’s premier/pre-eminent legislative and policy think-tank.

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On a mission to bridge the gap between people and parliament, it coordinates the LEG’ACEs in line with its drive to encourage proper scrutiny of legislative candidates, with the aim of electing productive legislators integral to effective service delivery by the government.

OrderPaper believes in the legislature being the foremost of the three branches of Government in a representative democracy and is poised to encourage voters to jettison the system of bandwagon politics whereby legislative candidates are largely elected based on their alignment with popular executive candidates. This they say is not necessarily on their merit and, as such, greatly affecting the quality of representation in our legislature.

The project is thus being implemented as part of the VOTER (Validating the Office of The Electorate on Representation) Project with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under the Strengthening Civic Advocacy and Local Engagement (SCALE) Project by Palladium.

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