December 23, (THEWILL) – The All Progressives Congress (APC) has faulted a fresh poll conducted by NOI Polls Limited, which put the 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, ahead of three other frontline candidates.
The new poll commissioned by ANAP Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited in December 2022, put Obi ahead of three other frontline candidates with a 23% positive response for the LP candidate, an improvement on the 21% Obi recorded when the poll was first conducted in September.
The report of the new poll, which was released on Wednesday, put the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his counterparts in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) in second, third and fourth positions respectively.
While the fresh poll rated Obi 23%, Tinubu 13%, Atiku 10% and Kwankwaso 2%, President of ANAP Foundation, Atedo Peterside, had said mobile phones were deployed to conduct the poll because of increased mobile phone penetration in the country.
But faulting the poll, a statement issued by the Chief Spokesperson for the Tinubu/Shettima Presidential Campaign Council, Festus Keyamo (SAN), raised a number of questions including the medium through which the poll was conducted.
Keyamo, who labelled the poll a “fallacy”, said, it was “deliberately skewed” to encourage Obi’s supporters whose enthusiasms have waned in recent times.
The statement titled “The Falacy of The So-called ANAP Foundation Poll”, read: “There is no need to join issues with or analyse this fallacious polls any further once you see the methodology by which the polls were conducted: according to Atedo Peterside, it was ONLY by phone that it was conducted because of the ‘insecurity’ across the country. They did not conduct a person-to-person enquiry.
QUESTIONS: (1.) How did they ascertain the phone numbers of those who reside or are registered in a particular State?
(2) If it is from the INEC register (was it made available to them?) how did they ascertain those that have collected their PVCs and are eligible to vote, since collection of PVC just began?
(3) Assuming the INEC register was not made available to them, and they randomly sampled opinions by phone numbers and asked people to state their locations or where they are registered to vote, what gave them the assurance that respondents truthfully stated their locations?
(4) It is a fact that many people in Nigeria have two to three phone numbers; if so, how sure are they that many respondents did not respond by different phone numbers that they may have?
(5) It is also true that millions of under 18-year-olds have access to phones in Nigeria and the world, how did they ascertain the ages of those responding to their supposed enquiries?
“Many unanswered questions. In all, in a complex country like Nigeria, anything short of a person-to-person polling including harvesting enquiries from far flung rural areas and in local languages, is a complete exercise in futility.
“Finally, my considered opinion is that this poll is deliberately skewed to encourage the supporters of a particular candidate, whose enthusiasms have waned in recent times in the face of the hard realities they have seen on the ground on the campaign trail.”
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