The All Progressives Congress (APC) claims it is working nonstop to win the 2023 presidential election by a margin that will be impossible to challenge.
In a statement released on Thursday in Abuja, Mr. Bayo Onanuga, the Director of Media and Publicity for the APC Presidential Campaign Council, stated as much.
Onanuga was responding to a NOI Polls poll, pointing out that it was at odds with the realities of Nigeria.
“The attention of the APC Presidential Campaign Council has been drawn to a poll conducted by the NOI Polls which made wild and incredible permutations on the presidential election.
“We are 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 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,” Onanuga said.
He noted that NOI had said in the results that Goodluck Jonathan, the then-president, had the best overall familiarity rating at 99% and a net favorability probability of ±25.
Onanuga claimed that in contrast, NOI rejected Muhammadu Buhari, the then-APC candidate, as an underdog who needed significant public relations to improve his performance.
He continued by saying that, notwithstanding the findings, the APC candidate, who is now President Muhammadu Buhari, won the election when Nigerians went to the polls.
He said that this was not the only incident in which the NOI has used phoney statistics to further its political slant during an election.
He added that towards the 2019 presidential elections, and knowing fully that Buhari was going for re-election for a second term in office, the NOI pollsters embarked on another “abracadabra”.
Onanuga recalled that in June 2017, NOI Poll issued the results of another poll, that Nigerians preferred a middle-aged president.
The NOI pollsters, he said, had claimed that its poll was inspired by the election of Macron as the president of France and the campaign of the Not Too Young To Run.
“According to the predictable bias, NOI claimed that 64 per cent said they would prefer to vote for a presidential candidate between the ages of 40 and 50 years and 15 per cent preferred candidates between 51 and 60.
“In short, for a presidential candidate in his 70s, running for re-election, NOI results meant certain defeat.
“But when the Nigerian electorate went to the polls on February 23, 2019, the man the NOI polls had tried to bully with statistics out of the race won again,” Onanuga further recalled.
He added that at the time NOI was generating unrealistic figures to boost the ego of ex-president Jonathan, and a more serious and independent team of pollsters – Neo-Telligence based in the United Kingdom, used geo-demographics and public sentiment analysis to forecast the emergence of Buhari.
Onanuga said, by contrast, that their empirical analysis showed that two years before the 2015 presidential elections, Jonathan’s public approval rating on corruption, insecurity and the economy had nose-dived.
This, he said, was especially across most of the battleground states of the federation.
“Our objective profiling of NOI Polls as an anti-APC research organisation is grounded on the aforesaid facts.
“The NOI has chosen the preferred candidate and has decided to use fake, dubious statistics to package him to the Nigerian voters.
“We know as a matter of fact, the owners of NOI and where their political interest lies,” Onanuga said.
He, therefore, advised NOI to stop polluting the political system with irresponsible, unscientific and biased polling to avoid being exposed.
“The APC 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 (SDP) in July 1992.
“He will do it on the nationwide scale on February 25, 2023,” Onanuga stressed.