Obi Nollywood actor, can’t win presidential election

Kaduna state governor Nasir El-Rufai has said Labor Party candidate Peter Obi is a Nollywood actor, adding that the former Anambra state governor is unable to win the 2023 presidential election to win.

El-Rufai said this when he appeared on Journalists’ Hangout on TVC, followed by our correspondent on Thursday.

When asked about the polls predicting Obi’s victory, the Kaduna governor said most of them were designed to have a high margin of error.

“Opinion polls are biased. See, data analytics is an area I’m in love with. When I was a student at the Kennedy School of Government, I was a teaching assistant for statistics, so I understand these things. I am not speaking as a politician who is a layman; I understand these things. The important thing is to look at the examples followed by your methodology. If you have about 100 million registered voters and you sample 2,000 registered voters or 300 registered voters, your results will be unreliable from day one; they will have high margins of error. And most of these polls are like that.

“What about the methodology? Most of these polls, such as Bloomberg’s, ANAP’s, and Okonjo Iweala’s, all used the telephone. What percentage of registered voters have telephone numbers in INEC’s records? We found out and it’s 31 percent. So from scratch, you start with only 31 percent of the total sample of voters. So if you pick your 31 percent sample from day one, your results are dead on arrival. I can take any of these polls and deconstruct them because I understand what sampling is, I understand methodology and those polls are a joke, with the utmost respect.

“We conducted a poll with a sample of nearly 40,000 across Nigeria and the result of the poll shows that we are ahead of the game. It’s going to be a tight election, there’s a high percentage of doubters, so we all have to work hard to get the doubters on our side. But we have a head start,” he said.

El-Rufai dismissed Obi’s chances in the upcoming election, stating that the election is between the ruling All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party.

“How can Peter Obi win an election? Peter Obi only gets one percent in Sokoto, two percent in Katsina, five percent in Kano, that’s where the votes are. All states are not equal. Just because you do 70 percent in Anambra State doesn’t mean someone who does 10 percent in Kano isn’t better than you.

“Kano is four million voices actually happening. The number of votes in Anambra is the number of one local government in Kano. All states are not equal. If you poll states and level them, yes, Peter Obi will sweep the southeastern states, he’ll do well in the south-south; where else? He’s not doing well in the Southwest polls, except for a drop in the ocean in Lagos.

“He’s polling the Christian enclaves in the north, but how many are they? Peter Obi can’t win the election. He doesn’t have the number of states, he doesn’t have 25 percent in over 16 states, last time we checked. He has nowhere to go. Peter Obi is a Nollywood actor and that’s all he will be. This election is between the APC and the PDP because they have the footprint, they have the spread. Ethnicity and religious intolerance will get you nowhere and that is what the Labor Party campaign is all about,” he said.