PRESS CONFERENCE ADDRESSED BY THE INTERIM NATIONAL PUBLICITY SECRETARY OF THE ALL PROGRESSIVES PARTY (APC), ALHAJI LAI MOHAMMED, IN ABUJA ON MARCH 4th 2014 TO ANNOUNCE THE UNVEILING OF THE APC ROAD MAP Good morning gentlemen. As you are aware by now, our party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), will be unveiling its Road map to a New Nigeria at The National Summit to be held here on Thursday. We issued a statement to this effect on Sunday. The Summit, which is strictly by invitation, will be held at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja, starting from 9 a.m. and the Keynote Speaker will be a former Minister of Education, Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili. As we said in our statement, the Road map will detail APCs priorities in fixing the widespread failings of successive PDP governments since 1999, in order to bring hope and succour to the long-suffering people of Nigeria. We also said the Road map was a product of an empirical and painstaking process embarked upon by our party, in a departure from the old practice of packaging such documents on a whim. Now, if you would recall, we did say in that statement that we commissioned the largest ever public opinion survey in Nigerian history to determine the current status of things in the nation directly from those who knew best - the actual people of Nigeria. We said the results of the opinion survey were even more revealing than we had anticipated. Unfortunately, not everyone who read our statement understood it, hence the totally unnecessary and clearly misplaced criticism by the presidency, which tagged our effort Voodoo Polling and said it does not know when the APC became an expert on opinion poll. We have no doubt that the methodology adopted to evolve our Road map and the results of our survey took the Presidency by surprise and rankled them so much, since they haven’t seen any unbiased survey results in quite some time. Well, it is common knowledge that the truth sometimes hurts but facts are facts. And before we review our survey results again, lets make the following clarification: First, the Presidency was clearly confused. They seemed to think the APC conducted this survey ourselves. No, they got things wrong. Unlike the PDP, we do not conduct surveys ourselves; instead, we commission professionals to conduct our polls. We use experts in the field so that the results are accurate and above reproach. In this instance our poll was conducted by KA Research Limited, Africa Division. It was the largest survey of its kind ever conducted in Nigeria.I understand how this might have been confusing to the Presidency, since the PDP does not use unbiased, professional pollsters. That explains why the results were such a shock to the PDP. The Presidency suggested we were practicing some kind of voodoo, it seems that the voodoo is coming entirely from the PDP and its survey company. Second, just who is the PDP/Presidency’s polling company? It is a firm named NOI Polls. And just who is this firm? Do those initials ring a bell with anyone? The Presidency’s pollster is none other than Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Coordinating Minister herself! And considering she has recently lost track of more than 20 Billion dollars at the NNPC, why would anyone trust any numbers she ever produced? If there’s anyone practicing voodoo, it’s NOI polls. And when you ask the Coordinating Minister about her polling company, make sure to also ask her about the money that’s disappeared, and that the people of Nigeria need their money back! So, now that we’ve set the record straight and we know our survey numbers are the correct and credible ones, let’s review those results one more time: • When asked, “If the election were held today, would you vote for Goodluck Jonathan or the candidate of the All Progressives Congress,” the APC candidate held a ten-point lead over the President. By a margin of 44% to 34% (with 22% undecided), the APC candidate was the clear national choice. • When asked, “In general, do you think things in Nigeria are going in a good direction or bad direction,” by a staggering more than two-to-one margin (50%-24%), Nigerians responded that the country was going in a bad direction. • When asked, “What issue would you like the President and National Assembly to focus on most,” an overwhelming majority (60%) said jobs was the dominant issue that the government should address. • And then when asked if they found the following statement convincing or note, “Goodluck Jonathan has done nothing to create jobs, and far too many people are still unemployed.” Decisively, 58% of Nigerians found that argument about Jonathan convincing. • Finally, when asked if Jonathan was doing a good or bad job fighting corruption, 59% of Nigerians thought Jonathan was a doing a bad job fighting corruption. The message is clear: The nation is going in the wrong direction. The nation wants change and would not vote to re-elect Jonathan in part because the number one issue to Nigerians is jobs and the nation believes Jonathan has no credibility on the issue of job creation. Nigerians also believe Jonathan has done an extremely poor job fighting corruption (that he’s actually closed his eyes to corruption) and that the resources that should be invested in job creation, infrastructure and economic development have been stolen and wasted – undermining the nation’s opportunity. For the benefit of the President and its likes who are hard of hearing, lets give more specifics on the Polling Company and Poll: The survey has been conducted by KA Research Limited, Africa Division, on behalf of APC Nigeria within the 2015 Pre-Election Polling Program, between December 9th, 2013 and January 12th, 2014. The survey results is based on a Face to Face Nationwide Survey conducted in 36 States + FCT in Nigeria; with sample size of 21.091 Interviews; representing 18+ Population of Nigeria living in urban and rural settlements. The survey respondents have been selected using multi-stage random sampling methodology across all Nigerian States; interviewed by experienced and trained local field teams in each state. The survey results have a margin of sampling error of +/- 0.7%, including design effect. KA Research Limited (KARL) is a privately owned international research company, based in Brussels, Belgium and Istanbul, Turkey; operating in more than 60 countries with its own offices, subsidiaries and affiliates in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA Region). The company specializes in social and political polling; economic and media research in EMEA Region; its clientele includes private, governmental, non-governmental and academic clients, think-tanks; such as World Bank, United Nations, UNICEF, UNDP, Save The Children, USAID, DFID, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, CSIS, Brooking Institutions, National Democratic Institute, ABC News, BBC World Service, NHK Japan, ARD Germany, Deutsche Welle, Radio France International, Coca-Cola and Burger King Corporations; the company is also cooperating and working closely with major global research and consulting companies in EMEA Regions. We hope the the PDP will also come clean on its own survey company; the fact that it is owned by a serving Minister whose initials are used to name the company, and the fact that it has been feeding doctored opinion poll to Nigerians. We have chosen to call the opinion polls they conduct on behalf of themselves and for themselves incestuous. We have nothing more to add! I thank you!
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:08:35 +0000
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