Ahead of the general election slated for February 25, 2023, permutations have been rife over who among the 18 presidential candidates is likely to win the poll.
Several polling agencies have made public the results of their polls, narrowing down the candidates for the country’s top job to three, or four in some cases.
Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, Peter Obi of the Labour Party, and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party are seen as the key contenders.
Obi is the most preferred to be the next Nigerian president, according to the surveys conducted by NOI Polls, commissioned by the ANAP Foundation.
ANAP Foundation is a non-profit organisation committed to promoting good governance and has also been collaborating with NOI Polls Limited since 2011 to institutionalise a polling culture that helps political leaders to be aware and more conscious of the yearnings of the electorate.
With the last report announced by Atedo Peterside, president and founder of ANAP Foundation, on Wednesday, BusinessDays’s analysis shows that Obi won the three polls with 65 percent of voters proposing to vote for him; 39 percent for Tinubu and 33 percent for Atiku Abubakar. Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with 8 percent of voters proposing to vote for him.
According to the report, undecided voters and those who prefer not to reveal their choice candidate across the polls add up to 84 and 68 percent respectively.
Evidence from the first two surveys shows that Obi’s winning streak is connected to the electorate’s inclinations to vote in the forthcoming elections, which include the need to tackle insecurity (45 percent), the economy (20 percent), education (9 percent), unemployment (7 percent) and poverty alleviation (4 percent).
Similarly, the data from the last report showed the top five reasons why voters are more inclined to vote in the election: the need to tackle insecurity (36 percent), inflation (26 percent), unemployment (11 percent), poverty alleviation (6 percent) and education (5 percent).
The presidential candidates’ manifestos contain proposed solutions or answers to these issues motivating voters to go to the polls but most of the voters polled identified more with Obi’s answers to the five challenges they want to be solved.
In addition to that, Obi’s popularity dominated the various age range participating in the seventh presidential election.
The results from the poll released on September 15, 2022, showed that 69 percent of those aged 18-25, 76 percent of those aged 26-35, 77 percent of those aged 36-45, 87 percent of those aged 46-60 and 89 percent of those aged 61+ responded, saying that they would definitely vote in the coming elections. The age groups that expressed the greatest willingness to vote were those between 46-60 and 61+ years.
In the second poll, released December 21, 202, 81 percent of those aged 18-25, 83 percent of those aged 26-35, 85 percent of those aged 36-45, 89 percent of those aged 46-60 and 81 percent of those aged 61+ responded that they would definitely vote in the coming elections. The age groups that expressed the greatest willingness to vote were those between 36-45 and 46-60 years.
However, a trend high enough to keep the politicians not only on their toes but also on top of their game is the high level of undecided voters and those who chose not to reveal their preferred candidate.
“While these poll results show some significant trends, it is key to note that the battle ahead lies in the hands of the undecided/swing voters, as it appears they would ultimately decide which candidate takes the lead to emerge as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in the 2023 presidential elections,” ANAP Foundation said.
Read also:Peter Obi on why he is running to be Nigeria’s president
The influence of the collaboration between the ANAP Foundation and NOI Polls can be attributed to a statement made in the most recent report: “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.”
“In all those preceding presidential polls, the front-runner that was identified by our polls ended up winning the elections, despite of a relatively substantial number of voters who were undecided and/or refused to say who their favoured candidate was. We used the same process in our governorship polls in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2019, and 2022, and it worked wonderfully. We are, of course, aware of several key contrasts between the 2023 presidential contest and previous years, for example. 1) A lengthier campaign season; 2) the existence of four main contenders rather than two; and 3) increased voter enthusiasm,” it added.
“Peter Obi has been the front-runner throughout this campaign, but we caution that the undecided/refused vote is still too large (in early February 2023) to overlook,” ANAP Foundation said. “We expected the undecided vote to collapse if we delayed our third and final poll until early February 2023. The reality is that the decrease in the undecided vote has been more than compensated by an increase in the number of voters who refuse to reveal the name of their favourite candidate. When we conducted our first and baseline poll in September 2022, we assumed that a long campaign cycle would result in different candidates taking turns leading the field. That has not been the case. This long-running race has been disappointingly stagnant.”
