For the umpteenth time, Peter Obi will win the elections – that is according to another one in an increasingly long list of election predictors who go by nothing but lazy simple random sampling techniques. The populace has recently been overwhelmed, despite their groaning under harsh CBN policy formulation, with certain polls coming thick and fast, all projecting that Peter Obi and his intangible labour party will win the election by all sorts of margins. In a word, these polls all project that the labour party will defeat the ruling party in several states because of the magic man, Peter Obi. What is to be made of these?
To start with, no one, except those who know nothing, will trust these polls. The science of it is simple; when a researcher is conducting a random sampling technique, the population size of the technique is important. If the researcher were sampling an area with a population of one million, then the sample size would ideally be a hundred people.
Exponentially, if the researcher were sampling a hundred million people, then the sample size should be about a hundred thousand people. This is the only way to get a reasonably accurate estimate of facts from the simple random sample technique. The sample population must also be weighted for their political muscle within the polity, given Nigeria’s challenging path to the presidency, which requires broad national support reflected in 25% of votes in 24 states and securing the majority.
Any poll, such as those that have endorsed the labour party and its cross-carpeting candidate, with a sample size of fewer than 20,000 respondents will get results such as Peter Obi winning in Kwara State, and this invites speculation of the pollsters being hired for a job, which is not at all far fetched.
It is evident to the public, except obidients who live both in denial and suspended animation, that neither the labour party nor Peter Obi are in possession of the required structure and funds for a large-scale campaign. Thus, they have resorted to heavy use of social media to drive their messages, often untrue in nature and more uncouthly in style, across to people.
They employ a rabid mob of social media warriors who terrorize dissenters into a spiral of silence. Naturally, they incur more enemies than believers but they do not mind whose ox is gored, so long as they can convince their paymasters that they have conquered social media. Their paymasters in turn have to present this evidence of social media domination and these other nebulous polls – all paid for and cooked up – to their foreign sponsors in order to secure the funds to have a good time gallivanting over the polity and deluding themselves into believing they have half the chance.
Again, this is not bad, for they are at least more humane – give or take their penchant for all the dark arts of defamation, disinformation and distortion of truth – than the PDP and its divisive candidate, who oscillates between acceptance of policies that stifle the people and threatens absolute anarchy and janus faced criticism of the draconian policy.
At least, Peter Obi’s support is from foreign sponsors who live in a reality created only by pollsters who are good at appropriating numbers to geopolitical zones but cannot read the handwriting on the wall.
That crowd is infinitely more sufferable than the one who goes into all sorts of loathsome deals with faceless power merchants tossing the presidency about like a reef in the ocean and plotting the total breakdown of order in the country to prevent elections simply because they are afraid of one man winning and putting them to open rout.
For now, let Peter’s pollsters massage his shoulders so that he can make withdrawals from his sponsors. Elections are more serious than tweets, retweets and teaser polls.