The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) Presidential candidate, Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso, has called the attention of Nigerians to the dangers posed by various opinion polls predicting the likely outcome of the 2023 presidential election.
Kwankwaso made this known during an interview on Channels Television programme, ‘The 2023 Verdict,’ on Friday, February 10, 2022.
This comes after various opinion polls predicted that the Labour Party Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, will be the likely winner of the upcoming presidential election.
Recall that this week alone, two separate opinion polls by Stears and Bloomberg projected victory for Obi on February 25.
This followed previous polls conducted by ANAP, NOI, and Nextier which also projected that the former Anambra State Governor was way ahead of other frontline candidates including All Progressives Party (APC)’s Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s Atiku Abubakar, and Kwankwaso.
Meanwhile, all the polls predicted that the NNPP presidential candidate would finish a distant fourth in the race.
But, in his reaction, Kwankwaso alleged that the poll results are unreliable because the pollsters have been sponsored to manipulate the outcome in favour of the Labour Party presidential candidate.
He said the motives for this was to ensure that the beneficiary gets donations, especially from foreign donors and also to create crisis when the result of election isn’t in his favour.
He, therefore, called on the Federal Government and security agencies to pay attention to the developments in order to forestall any post-election crisis in the country.
Kwankwaso’s words: “We have people who are sponsoring all sorts of fake opinion polls. Opinion polls in the air, using phone calls of few thousands and they write results and say this is number one, this is number two.
“What they’re doing is very dangerous to this country and I want the security agencies, the Federal Government, and all those concerned to take note of it.“
Explaining the inherent dangers, the NNPP presidential flag-bearer recalled a similar scenario when crisis broke out in Northern Nigeria in 2003 after Muhammadu Buhari had lost the presidential election against the popular expectations of the people of the region.
Kwankwaso’s words: “When Muhammadu Buhari started in 2003, in Northern Nigeria everybody was going to vote for Buhari. Especially in 2002, to the extent that I lost my seat mainly because of that wind.
“And people voting in Kano would think that everybody in this country was voting for Muhammadu Buhari, at the end of the day, of course you are just talking about your own area and when somebody(else) was announced those people only go out on the streets burning tyres and killing people and destroying properties because they thought everybody in the country was voting for Muhammadu Buhari and suddenly things happened in Northern Nigeria, especially in my zone in the North West.
“Now, a similar scenario is trying to rear its head again. Now that people are bringing fake figures believing that this is number one, this number two, this is number three, this is number four. And in our opinion, that paper should be put upside down, that’s the fact of the matter. Number four they’re putting should be number one.“
