BY IBRAHIM MOHAMMED, Abuja
Ahead of the February 25 presidential election, the flag bearer of the Labour Party (LP) has maintained a lead in a third and final nationwide opinion poll commissioned by ANAP Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited (NOI Polls).
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Releasing the result of the poll, the President and Founder of ANAP Foundation, Otedo Peterside reminded Nigerians that over the years since the organization started doing election polling in 2011, whoever that emerged the frontrunner ended up winning the presidential election.
In the three polls that ANAP Foundation/NOI Polls Limited has conducted in September and December 2022 and the last one published on Wednesday February 15, Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had led the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and the presidential candidate of New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) Alhaji Musa Rabiu Kwankwaso respectively. This therefore means that Peter Obi is likely to become the next president of Nigeria after the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Peterside also cleared doubts in the minds of those who doubt credibility and methodology of its polls, insisting that they followed the best practices as obtainable in any part of the world.
He said, “For the avoidance of doubt, it is pertinent to mention that the methodology used by NOI polls is almost the exact same methodology that was used in previous presidential polls that they handled for us in 2011, 2015 and 2019,” he said in the statement.
“In all those past presidential polls, the front-runner that was identified by our polls ended up winning the elections, irrespective of a rather large percentage of voters who were undecided and/or refused to indicate who their preferred candidate was.
“We have also applied the exact same methodology in our various governorship polls carried out in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2019 and 2022 and the methodology generally held up well.”
He said its third and final poll result in February 2023 showed that Obi of the Labour Party remains in the lead, with Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) both trailing him while Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) emerged as the “lone outsider”.
“Obi leads with 21% of registered voters proposing to vote for him if the presidential election were to be conducted today; and 13% proposing to vote for Tinubu who fell in second place. Atiku was third with 10% and Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with 3% of voters proposing to vote for him.
“Given the large pool of undecided voters and/or those who refused to disclose their preferred choice, Mr. Peter Obi’s 8%-point lead at this stage is significant, but not sufficient to separate him from a leading pack of candidates scoring 13%, 10% and 3%.
“Undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their preferred candidate add up to a whopping 23% and 30% respectively. The gender split of undecided voters shows that 27% of women are undecided versus 18% of male registered voters,” he said.
A breakdown of the result showed that Peter Obi of the Labour Party was able to defeat Bola Tinubu of the APC and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP in North Central with 24 % of the votes, South East by 53%, South South by 38% and emerged the only candidate to lead in three geopolitical zones, while Atiku Abubakar could only lead in North East and North West with 17% and 20% votes respectively. APC’s Bola Tinubu was also able to win in only two zones, North West and South West where he led with 20% and 15% respectively. In South West Tinubu could only beat Obi with only 1% as the LP presidential candidate polled 14% of votes in the South West.
Rabiu Kwankwaso of the NNPP did not lead in any geopolitical zone in the country.