A clear majority of respondents said they intend to vote for Peter Obi.
Festus Keyamo, the spokesman for the Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council, responded to a recent Bloomberg poll finding Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) to be the most popular candidate going into the 2023 presidential election.
Keyamo criticised the poll, claiming it was flawed and unreliable.
Former Lagos and Borno governors, Bola Tinubu and Kashim Shettima are the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of the APC respectively.
On Thursday, Bloomberg released a poll indicating that Peter Obi was ahead of others in the run up to the election.
A clear majority of respondents said they intend to vote for Peter Obi, a former Anambra state governor, in the election scheduled for February 2023. The results of the survey conducted for Bloomberg News by Premise Data Corp. were published on Wednesday as the official campaign to succeed President Muhammadu Buhari kicked off.
Of the 92% of participants who said they’ve decided how to vote, 72% named Obi as their first choice. Of those who are still unsure, 45% said the 61-year-old is their preferred candidate.
According to the report, 3,973 Nigerians participated in the poll between September 5 and 20. Respondents to the app-based poll were selected from quotas developed by age, gender and location across the country’s six geopolitical zones. Results were then weighted against the original quotas to ensure national representation. About 44% of Nigerians own smartphones, according to the Alliance for Affordable Internet.
Less well-performing were the candidates of the two parties that have controlled Nigeria since democracy was restored in 1999.
Obi, a former governor of the Anambra state in the southeast who served for two terms, is running on the platform of the Labour Party, which gained one seat in the Senate and House of Representatives in the most recent election in 2019. Both chambers of the National Aassembly are dominated by the APC and PDP.
However, commenting on the result of the poll by Bloomberg on his verified Twitter handle, Keyamo said it was the worst mistaken poll he has ever seen.
“The report of @BloombergAfrica said it used an APP to conduct an opinion poll in Nig. where more than 95% don’t have access to such apps. This style is even lower in credibility than when you send people to the field. This is the most delusional Poll I have seen since I was born,” Keyamo said.
The 2023 Nigerian elections will be held, in large part, on 25 February and 11 March 2023.