Obi’s poll lead puts Tinubu in panic
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
An opinion survey across the country conducted by NOI Polls puts Peter Obi eight points clear of both Bola Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar in the run for President, and Tinubu and his team are in panic mode gleaned from their reaction.
The poll was conducted in early September. The result was announced on Thursday, and 24 hours later, some Tinubu people asked a court to block Obi’s Lagos rally planned for 1 October.
The poll confirms what the public already knows that the 2023 vote is a three-horse race between the candidates of the Labour Party (Obi) All Progressives Congress (Tinubu), and Peoples Democratic Party (Atiku).
The survey, commissioned by Anap Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited, shows Obi leading the pack with 21 per cent of respondents saying they would vote for him if the ballot were done today.
Tinubu and Atiku each got 13 per cent to come joint second, both of them 8 percentage points adrift of Obi.
Rabiu Kwankwaso, the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), came a distant fourth with 3 per cent.
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Obi’s lead significant but not a closure
“Mr. Peter Obi’s 8 percentage points lead at this early stage is significant, but not sufficient to separate him completely from a leading pack of candidates scoring 21%, 13%, and 13% respectively,” explained Anap Foundation founder and President Atedo Peterside, per reporting by Vanguard.
“Undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their preferred candidate add up to a whopping 32% and 15% respectively.
“The gender split of undecided voters shows that 39% of women are undecided versus 27% of male voters.”
Team Tinubu’s reaction
Tinubu’s APC Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) described NOI Polls surveys as dubious, unrealistic, and inconsistent.
A statement issued by PCC Media and Publicity Director Bayo Onanuga rubbished the current result. It ignored the fact Obi is popular with the youth who constitute 71 per cent of new registered voters.
Onanuga cited historical election results, which he said NOI Polls predicted wrongly, without factoring in pervasive rigging in all the presidential votes held in Nigeria since 1999 and beyond.
Electronic transmission of result from polling units, which has reduced the chances of vote rigging since at least 2020, will be deployed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in 2023.
In any case, the true impact of the poll result on Tinubu showed on Friday when some people representing him asked a court to prevent Obi from holding a rally in Lagos, where Tinubu lives and governed between 1999 and 2007.
“Our party is putting every necessary machinery in motion to win the federal elections with a margin that will be too wide to contest,” Onanuga said, according to reporting by Vanguard.
“Our candidate … Tinubu recorded the highest votes of a senator across the country under the Social Democratic Party in July 1992. He will do it on nationwide scale on February 25, 2023.
“We are unperturbed by these dubious and unreliable statistics because our research shows that NOI Polls have been off the mark at critical election periods in recent times.”
2015 election
The statement cited an example of how NOI published in October 2014 the results of a “Viability Poll” preparatory to the 2015 election which used the concepts of Familiarity and Net Favourability Position to survey.
“In the results, NOI claimed that President Goodluck Jonathan has the best overall familiarity rating at 99% and Net Favourability Probability of ±25.
“By contrast, NOI dismissed the then All Progressives Congress candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, as a ‘borderline candidate’ who needed ‘huge public relations’ to shore up his performance.
“But when the Nigerian people went to the polls, who won? The APC candidate and now President, Muhammadu Buhari.
“This is not the only instance when the NOI has turned its political bias in an election period to fraudulent statistics.”
2019 election
Onanuga also recounted that towards the 2019 presidential election, and knowing that Buhari was going for re-election for a second term in office, “the NOI pollsters embarked on another abracadabra”.
“In June 2017, they issued the results of another poll, that Nigerians prefer a middle-aged president claiming that this poll was inspired by the election of [Emmanuel] Macron as the president of France and the campaign of the Not Too Young To Run.
“According to the predictable bias, NOI claimed that 64% said they would prefer to vote for a presidential candidate between the ages of 40 and 50 years and 15% preferred candidates between 51 and 60.
“In short, for a presidential candidate in his 70s running for re-election, NOI results meant certain defeat. But when the Nigerian people went to the polls on February 23, 2019, the man the NOI Polls had tried to bully with statistics out of the race won again.”
NOI is anti-APC, Onaguga claims
“It is significant that at the time NOI was generating the unrealistic figures to boost the ego of President Jonathan, a more serious and independent team of pollsters- Neo-Telligence based in the United Kingdom used geo-demographics and public sentiment analysis to forecast the emergence of President Buhari.
“By contrast, their empirical analysis showed that two years before the 2015 presidential elections, Goodluck Jonathan’s public approval rating on corruption, insecurity and the economy had nosedived across most of the battleground states.
Onanuga alleged NOI is an anti-APC research organisation.
“We believe this present report is, in the language of Nigerians, wuruwuru to the answer” as NOI chose a preferred candidate and “decided to use fake, dubious statistics to package him to the Nigerian voters.
“We know as a matter of fact, the owners of NOI and where their political interest lies and wish to advise NOI to stop polluting the political system with irresponsible, unscientific and biased polling so that we don’t expose the puppeteers pulling its strings.”