Reality of Online polls is that they produce better results when married with grassroots mobilisation.
By Nchee Nwabunnia
The 2023 Presidential Election has prompted many online polls. These polls are a standard way of popularity and acceptance check world over. In advance countries, such polls often tally with the final outcome of elections.
Going by all concluded online polls regarding the Nigeria’s upcoming 2023 election, former Governor of Anambra State, Peter Obi is consistently in the lead. The latest in the series was the one conducted by Kano-based independent newspaper, Arewa Trust, in which he was rated far above his opponents, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP). This comes on the heels of earlier surveys by the ANAP Foundation, NOI and Bloomberg in which he came tops.
This is a clear indication that he is the most acceptable of all the candidate, especially amongst the internet compliant, mostly educated and well-informed Nigerians. If Nigeria was a developed country, where such outcomes were to count on election day, one would simply conclude that Peter Obi would win the 2023 presidential election.
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But in Nigeria, such conclusion is difficult to arrive at. This is based on the fact that ours is a mostly illiterate and non-internet subscribed population; A population deprived of basic education and subjected to poverty by years of poor leadership; A population that is usually influenced and taken advantage of through vote buying. The reality of the conjecture of online polls is the challenge posed by the illiterate and non-internet subscribed majority.
For the hoodwinked and or beneficiaries of a failed state, where the less informed or ill-informed and sometimes less sophisticated determine who wins an election, it is time to think again. We cannot continue in that same direction. It will amount to nothing but vicious circle. The Nigeria of our dream cannot be realised through this failed pattern. For the emergence of any sensible administration, the electorate will be required to make informed choice. This is what the online poll represents and the fact of the Obi running victory.
It is therefore time for the drivers of the Obi/Datti Campaign Team to move their campaign to the grassroots. The internet circles have been conquered and is on autopilot at the moment. The less privileged masses of Nigeria who are mostly in the rural areas deserve to hear the good message of the emerging leader.
Traumatised Nigerians who can no longer go to their farms and those whose children and wards can no longer go to school due to insecurity are certainly in need of a truly responsible government. Those who are refugees in their own country and those whose family members were massacred by bandits or Boko Haram are not left out. If the Obi campaign message is made to be clear and concise, I strongly believe that the masses of Nigerians in the north and other troubled parts of the country who are in dire need of reprieve from the bondage inflicted by the current administration in the land will key in.
Just like the fact of defying the usual two dominant political party system, the need to work hard to dilute and neutralize religious and ethnic tendencies at the grassroots should be a core mandate of the Obi/Datti Campaign Team at this stage.
The radio comes to mind as it is often a greater communication tool in parts of the north and other rural areas than the telephone. Indigenous languages must be the mediums of communication as English language in not understood by many in those remote parts of the country. The reality of Online polls is that they produce better results when married with grassroots mobilisation
This campaign is more of a national assignment; A national re-orientation of sort and a liberation of the misinformed lot. A new Nigeria is certainly possible.
Nchee Nwabunnia, political scientist, wrote from Lagos
