While the ceremonies around the demise of the United Kingdom’s longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth, were still on, Nigeria’s political discourse shifted with the result of a controversial opinion poll on presidential favourites in the forthcoming 2023 elections, by ANAP foundation.
This was followed in quick succession by polls from two other reputable polling organisations.
Using different methodologies, results from the 3 polling organisations put Peter Obi, the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, ahead of all other presidential candidates in the forthcoming 2023 elections.
The 3 polling organisations are NOI polls which conducted the poll online for ANAP Foundation; Premise Data Corp. which conducted the poll online for Bloomberg; and We2Geda which conducted the poll for Daily Trust using telephone interviews.
In the result of the poll conducted and released by the ANAP Foundation, Mr Obi was ranked first, defeating Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP).
Tinubu and Atiku shared the second position, while Mr Kwankwaso came to a distant fourth position in the poll.
However, here is a note of caution: 47% of the respondents were either undecided yet or refused to respond to the poll question.
It has been a few months since Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso dumped Nigeria’s largest opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to pick the presidential tickets of the Labour Party (LP) and New Nigerian People’s Party (NNPP) respectively.
The All-Progressives Congress (APC) and PDP have produced the presidents and controlled the National Assembly, and governed all but a few of the 36 states of the federation since the Fourth Republic began in 1999.
However, the supporters of the minority parties, especially those of Mr Obi, believe that the apple cart is about to be upturned. The NOI opinion poll that put the LP candidate at the head of the standings before the campaigns formally begin on 28 September, lends credence to their belief.
The former Anambra governor is widely seen as the biggest threat to the candidate of the ruling APC, Bola Tinubu, and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP.
The trio dominate discussions on Twitter in Nigeria. This trend has set the stage for tantalising electioneering from 28 September.
Election Antecedents before the Polls (1993-2019)
There are two reasons the recent polls may be showing a departure from election antecedents, where region/ethnicity and religion have been the absolute determinants of presidential election outcomes between 1993 and 2019.
First, the destruction of the northeast, northwest, and northcentral states by Islamic insurgency and banditry throughout President Muhammadu Buhari’s, a Muslim northerner’s, regime is weakening the religion, region and ethnic card.
Besides, Afenifere, the foremost southwest Yoruba sociocultural group, and a significant number of people from the southwest are not supporting Bola Tinubu, even though the candidate is from southwest Nigeria.
The body language of the former President Obasanjo, a notable political influence in the country also betrays his preference for Peter Obi over his kinsman and candidate from the Southwest, Bola Tinubu.
However, election patterns from 1993 till the last election in 2019 show that ‘Nigerians’ continuously vote along regional/ethnic and religious lines only. Data support this position, in the chapter authored by Joshua Olufemi, titled “Let figures now lead, and ideas follow”, in the compendium, Remaking Nigeria: Sixty years, Sixty voices:
“When a presidential aspirant from the southwest region (SW) faced an opponent from the northwest region (NW), the SW voted 86% and 91% in 1993 and 2003 respectively for the eventual SW winner. They voted 58% for a south-south (SS) winning candidate, while their votes declined from 55% to 49% respectively for a winning candidate from the NW in 2015 and 2019, respectively.
The SS region appears to be able to countenance any presidential candidate from other parts of the country except the NW. Alongside with the Southeast (SE), they voted lowest for the aspirant who eventually won, and who was from the NW in 2015 and 2019.
For the SE, the only time they felt the presidential aspirant represented them was in 2011, with a presidential aspirant from the SS. They led all the other regions in the vote for the winner of that election with an unprecedented 98%.
The northeast region (NE) always voted a little above the NW for the winning presidential candidate that was outside the North as a whole, and they voted a little less than the NW when the winning candidate was from the NW, even in 2019 when they had a candidate from NE.