The All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential campaign council has dismissed a poll giving the Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi the lead in next year’s poll.
According to the poll commissioned by the Anap Foundation and conducted by NOI Polls Limited, it said the election is a three-horse race. It said Obi is leading the race with 21 percent of the votes. His votes give him an eight percent lead over APC’s Tinubu and PDP’s Abubakar who each got 13 percent of the votes to end up as joint second in the poll.
But the APC council in a statement hours after the result of the poll was released, said it is “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.
“For example, preparatory to the March 2015 presidential elections, NOI published in October 2014 the results of a “Viability Poll” 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 a 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.”
The statement by the Director, Media, and Publicity of the council, Bayo Onanuga, accused the NOI of turning its “political bias in an election period to fraudulent statistics.
“The NOI has chosen the preferred candidate and has decided to use fake, dubious statistics to package him to the Nigerian voters,” Onanuga said in the statement.
“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.
“Our party is putting every necessary machinery in motion to win the federal elections with a margin that will be too wide to contest. Our candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu recorded the highest votes of a senator across the country under the Social Democratic Party in July 1992. He will do it on a nationwide scale on February 25, 2023.”
