2023: Why Peter Obi cannot win presidential election – El-Rufai

Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State Thursday said the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, will not win the 25 February presidential election.

The governor in an interview with TVC News said the projection by ANAP Foundation’s poll and other opinion polls in favour of Mr Obi were not accurately done, thus can not be relied upon to measure the success of the presidential candidate of the Labour Party.

Some polls had shown Mr Obi leading with Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), respectively, trailing him.

Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) emerged as distant fourth behind Messrs Tinubu and Atiku.

For instance, the ANAP poll conducted in early December 2022 showed 23 per cent of voters are willing to vote for Mr Obi in the presidential election and 13 per cent proposing to vote for Mr Tinubu who came second.

Atiku came third with 10 per cent and Mr Kwankwaso was a distant fourth with only two per cent of voters proposing to vote for him.

But Governor El-Rufai said the poll was not conducted accurately and that Mr Obi’s Labour Party is using ethnicity and religious bigotry in its campaign which will also make him not win the election.

“I was a teaching assistant for statistics, I understand it. I am not talking as a politician or a layman. The most important thing in looking at any opinion poll is the sample followed by the methodology.

“When you have hundreds of millions of registered voters and you are sampling three thousand registered voters, your results are unreliable, will have a high margin of errors and most of these polls (predicting Peter Obi as the winner of the election) are like that,” Mr El-Rufai said.

“All the opinion polls conducted, the Bloomberg one, the ANAP one and the Ngozi Iweala one all use the telephone. Only 31 per cent of voters registered contain phone numbers. When you pick your sample out of the 31 per cent, from day one, your result is dead on arrival.

“I can take every one of these opinion polls and deconstruct them because I understand what is sampling and what is a methodology and those polls are a joke with the greatest respect,” the governor said.

He added that one reliable poll conducted shows that the election is going to be a close contest between the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC).

“We have done a poll with a sample of nearly 40,000 across Nigeria and the results of the polls show that we are ahead, and it’s going to be a tight election. There is a large percentage of undecided voters. We must work hard to swing the undecided to our side but we are ahead.

“How can Peter Obi win any election? He is polling one per cent in Sokoto, two per cent in Katsina, and five per cent in Kano. That is where the votes are, all states are not equal.

“The fact that he is doing 70 per cent in Anambra State does not mean somebody doing 10 per cent in Kano is not better than him. Kano is four million votes, and the number of votes in Anambra is the size of one local government in Kaduna State.

“Peter Obi will win southeastern states, South-south, where else? He is not polling well in the South-west other than a drop in the ocean in Lagos.

“He is polling in the Christian enclaves in the north, but how many are they? Peter Obi cannot win the election, he doesn’t have the number of states, and he doesn’t have 25 per cent in more than 16 states, he can’t go anywhere.

“Peter Obi is a Nollywood actor and that is all he will speak about. This election is between the APC and the PDP because they have the footprints and the ‘spate’. Ethnicity and religious bigotry will not take you anywhere and that is what the Labour Party campaign is about,” Mr El-Rufai said.