A civil society organisation, Enough is Enough (EiE) Nigeria and SBM Intelligence has released election forecast for the March 11, governorship and state houses of assembly polls in 28 states, lamenting that the disconnect of electorates from the lower levels of governance is very unhealthy for democracy in Nigeria.
The group in a survey released on Thursday February 3, 2023 said that the undue focus on the presidency cannot possibly lead to a good outcome for the country as there are layers of governance between three tiers of government – federal, state and local government to facilitate substantive change.
According to the report, citizens have been conditioned to believe that the those in-charge of the local government are stooge for the governors, but insisted that “if citizens knew what demands they could place on the local government chairpersons, councillors and ward members, they could press them and spark a chain reaction that would force local governments to operate more autonomously.
“With the switch in the order of Nigerian elections in 2011 to prioritise the presidential elections, the peculiarity of down-ballot races, particularly for state-level offices, has only grown more compelling. That has not led, however, to an attendant increase in voter interest.”
EiE-SBM Intelligence said its projection for the election was based on the results of the presidential election and other non-quantitative factors such as governance incumbency - basically which party currently runs the state, established voting patterns, party dominance over the three election cycles and the party composition of the state’s representation in the incoming 10th National Assembly.
According to the report of the survey, which was conducted between January 16 and February 3, 2023, the group said the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will take 15 states, All Progressives Congress (APC) will win 10 states while Labour Party, New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) and All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) will win one state each.
A total of 8921 people were interviewed in the field regarding the presidential, governorship and legislative elections, EiE stated, adding “We also interviewed 2,613 people on phone. All interviews took place in all 36 states and Abuja.
“For our governorship calls, we have opted to use only responses from the field interviews. Given the fact that there are no governorship races in Anambra, Bayelsa, Edo, Ekiti, Imo, Kogi, Ondo and Osun, we expected that there would be a drop-off in the number of respondents for the gubernatorial questions, but we did not expect the drop off to be so great.
“In the 29 states that we asked governorship questions, we had answers in all, but at differing rates. It is only in 11 states, Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Borno, Kano, Kebbi, Lagos, Rivers, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara, that we had more than 50% of the respondents showing an interest in responding to the governorship elections. While in Taraba nearly every respondent answered, in Nasarawa, of 216 people polled, only three could be bothered.”
According to the survey report, the leading civil society group expressed disappointment that when they set out to conduct this survey, “we were hopeful that, like in our earlier calls for the federal results, we would be able to get enough data to at least attempt to model compositions for the state Houses of Assembly. In this we were unsuccessful.”
States that PDP will win according to the survey are: “Taraba, Plateau, Adamawa, Gombe, Bauchi, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi, Oyo, Delta, Rivers, Ebonyi, Akwa Ibom and Cross River. APC, according to the report of the survey, will win in Benue, Nasarawa, Niger, Kwara, Ogun, Lagos, Zamfara, Jigawa, Yobe and Borno states. NNPP will win Kano, LP Abia and APGA will take over Enugu state.