Former Anambra State Governor Peter Obi has again emerged as the preferred choice to become Nigeria’s next president, according to an opinion poll, the third in the past week to show the Labor Party candidate leading candidate.
In the survey commissioned by the ANAP Foundation and carried out by NOI Polls Limited (NOIPolls), respondents identified Mr. Obi as their favorite to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari in the elections scheduled for February 25.
The foundation published two polls last September and December showing the Labor Party candidate as the most favorable candidate.
In the latest poll, 21 percent of respondents said they had decided to vote for Labor’s Mr. Obi over 13 percent who said they would vote for the ruler’s Bola Tinubu. Congress of all progressivesand 10 percent in favor of Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party.
As in previous polls, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party is a “lone foreigner” trailing behind at 3 percent.
A total of 53 percent of respondents were undecided or refused to answer, according to a statement from ANAP on Wednesday. Obi’s 8 percent lead is “significant but not enough to separate him” from the pack, ANAP said.
The organization said 2,000 people participated in its recent survey that concluded this month.
Last week, the Labor Party candidate was identified as the preferred president by nearly 53 percent of respondents to Kwakol’s 1,008-person poll released on February 13. Messrs Tinubu and Abubakar scored less than 20 per cent.
Mr. Obi’s campaign has generated a momentum that many people did not expect. However, the ruling party and the main opposition PDP insist that he will not be able to win on February 25. NNPP’s Kwankwaso also said that Obi’s supporters are only on social media and that his appeal is too low in the country’s states to give him victory.
The ANAP poll said the gender split of undecided voters shows that 27 percent of women are undecided versus 18 percent of registered voters.
The percentage of registered voters and/or voters with Permanent Voter Credential (PVC) is as follows in each one of the zones: 96 percent in the Northeast, 93 percent in the Northwest and Southeast respectively.
Slightly lower voter registration percentages were recorded in the North Central at 92 percent, the Southwest at 89 percent and the South South at 88 percent, according to the survey.
Additionally, the maximum voter turnout in the 6 Geopolitical Zones is now within a narrow band of 88 to 96 percent.
Meanwhile, nine percent of respondents said that religion would affect the choice of candidates, while 87 percent responded that their choices were not influenced by religion. Similarly, seven percent responded in the affirmative that ethnicity affected their choice of candidates, while 89 percent responded that their choices were not influenced by ethnicity.
The data summarizes the top five reasons why voters are more inclined to vote in the upcoming election, as follows: the need to address insecurity (36 percent); inflation (26 percent); unemployment (11 percent); poverty alleviation (6%); and Education (5 percent).
Several people have criticized the methodology used to conduct the polls, but ANAP said that the methodology used by NOIPolls is almost the same methodology used in the previous presidential polls they conducted in 2011, 2015, and 2019.
“In all those past presidential polls, the top candidate identified by our polls ended up winning the election, regardless of a fairly large percentage of voters who were undecided and/or refused to indicate who their preferred candidate was,” ANAP said. .
The round concluded that their method has been “tried and tested” since 2011. However, they conceded that the 2023 presidential election “is too close to be called.”
“Mr. Peter Obi has been the favorite throughout, but we advise that the Undecided/Rejected vote is still too high (as of early February 2023) to be ignored. We had thought that by delaying our third and final poll until early February 2023 we would see a collapse of the swing vote.
“The reality is that the reduction in the Undecided Vote has been more than offset by the increase in the number of voters who refuse to reveal the name of their preferred candidate.”