The emperor’s new polls

The insinuation that the March 28 presi-dential election will be a close race between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari started like one huge joke, with pollsters, clowns and all; and, to all intents and purpose, that’s the way it will end-as a sick one. In The Ugly Side of Buhari and Jonathan, a […]

The insinuation that the March 28 presi-dential election will be a close race between President Goodluck Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari started like one huge joke, with pollsters, clowns and all; and, to all intents and purpose, that’s the way it will end-as a sick one.
In The Ugly Side of Buhari and Jonathan, a paid advertorial carried in several papers and titled to give the impression of double disinterestedness and unimpeachable objec-tivity, one Atedo Peterside, a supporter of President Goodluck Jonathan, was one of the first to say, without a shred of evidence and in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence to the contrary, that the election between President Jonathan and General Buhari will be a close one. But on closer look, it became clear that he was indeed not without his evidence.
At least he had evidence that might be a shred or one that stood in need of being shredded. It was an opinion poll taken by NOI Polls and commissioned by ANAP Foundation that had given President Goodluck Jonathan a 57% approval rating. An earlier one commissioned by the same ANAP and conducted by the same NOI Polls looked into Jonathan’s chances in the last presidential election. NOI Polls, which always boasts of using Gallup methodology, predicted Jonathan’s landslide victory. And it so came to pass; but considering the extent of rigging and other irregularities that marred that election, this would make NOI Polls have the distinction of being the only pollster in the world able to predict the result of rigging with such uncanny accuracy.
But that’s exactly what could have been happening when ANAP and NOI Polls-respectively a foundation owned by a friend of the president, commissioned a pollster established by a serving minister of his government. Their name says it all; the foundation ANAP is actually Atedo N.A. Peterside-ANAP Foundation, and NOI Polls is Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala-NOI Polls. What more remains to be said?
First, associating itself with the name of Gallup is unlikely to confer on it greater respectability than the reliability coefficient of its own polling will give it. Even though Gallup has been the biggest-or at least the one with the biggest sample-it has been criticized as an increasingly unreliable pollster, and has a recent history of performing very poorly, especially in presidential elections. It has still not fully recovered from its sleight of poll during the Obama-Romney saga.
But even if Gallup doesn’t carry all this excess baggage, it is still not clear how, and it looks highly improbable that, in its mere eight years of existence, NOI Polls has built the kind of expertise that will enable it conduct a nationwide poll in a complex society like Nigeria and achieve this kind of accuracy in prediction. Or was it created to churn out these figures we see it giving out in order to help prepare Nigerian society for the coming Big Lie?
And if as NOI Polls says, Jonathan is leading in the polls, why then is there all this desperation? Why are they so desperate that the search for any alternative to Buhari would go to all extremes-disqualify Buhari by any means, postpone and then cancel the elections, give across-the-board elongation of tenure to all the executive and legislative arms of governance, engineer Attahiru Jega’s sack, plan for an interim government and put the nation on edge?
With such beautiful poll figures, why not put your faith in NOI Polls and go to sleep and then wake up to defeat Buhari in a fair contest?  Or is NOI Polls just a hack of a pollster skewing numbers to score some political point? At least, there is nothing in the book to explain the great gulf that exists between the crowded reality we encounter daily on the ground and what this poll tells us.
While headcount at rallies is no scientific way of assessing political leanings or effective support, it is still a better indicator of that than putting together a hack pollster to skew numbers.
From even a cursory reading of the mood of the nation, neither the bandwagon effect nor underdog sympathy, nor even the sloppiest degree of sampling error or expected coverage bias could have accounted for the transformation that could reverse the numbers seen on the campaign trail and the situation in the country. It appears NOI is overdoing the mimicry: perhaps because Gallup has proved such a consistent Republican-leaning outlier, NOI Polls, in it effort to achieve equivalence with its mentor-pollster, might have wished to start as outlier for the ruling party here.
However, even as the government and its supporters frantically search for a solution that will stop the election, certainly not because they are so sure they are going to win it, some other analysts still say the odds favour the president. This was a position echoed even by The Economist newspaper of London. “Polling and observers suggest the race between him and the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, is too close to call, with each commanding about 42% of the vote.” Perhaps quite out of character, its visiting correspondent decided to rely more on what he thought was accurate local analysis than the more accurate diplomatic sources the newspaper traditionally consults.
By its nature, and from the examples of the work of the leading international pollsters, polling is inaccurate business; and, compared to Pew and Rasmussen, Gallup has of recent been hopelessly inaccurate. Yet even though it has been caught as a Republican-leaning outlier, its inaccuracy is not on account of partisan or pecuniary considerations. It is good to reassure oneself.
For good reason, this government lies in mortal fear of two types of polls-the democratic, free and fair and credible electoral poll, and the professional public opinion poll, and that is why it seeks to subvert the former and manufacture the latter.
The ways to win an election or re-election-and the ways to subvert one-are as many and varied as the candidates who vie for, and make it to, elective office. Some do get to it by the sheer force of popularity; others attain it on account of a track record of achievement or perceived competence and leadership qualities; others on account of fulfilled campaign promises; or, if all else fail, then on account of expertise in transparent rigging, which is what is playing itself out before the nation.
In contrast, there is only one way to manufacture an opinion poll that can be believed-and that is by employing The Big Lie Technique. And what is the big lie technique? Well, the big lie technique is just that-a technique of persuasion that uses and depends on a very big lie.
It is said to have either been invented or pointed out-but certainly made famous-by Adolf Hitler, the German leader. In his autobiography, Hitler had said, “That in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility and… the primitive simplicity of their minds [people] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large scale falsehoods. It would never come into their minds to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not be here that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”
This has been echoed by the US Office of Strategic Studies that says, “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it to be truth.”
That’s the way it is: a lie, or in some of these cases, an inaccuracy innocently repeated a multiplicity of times begins to look plausible, then it becomes possible, then probable, then it becomes a truth, then it becomes inevitable; and it finally becomes unchallengeable gospel. The bigger and more preposterous the lie, the easier and more natural the suspension of disbelief on account of its repetition. The higher the number of repetitions, the firmer the veracity of the truth established by it; the longer the duration of the repetitiveness, the greater the indisputability of its truthiness.
But, unfortunately, all this has not started early enough: it has not been repeated strenuously enough and they have not kept at it for long enough to convince others to doubt their own stand, abandon their own positions, and entombed in the spiral of silence-that perennial scourge of the pollster-embrace the poll and make it a nice self-fulfilling prophesy.
Here is a supposedly democratic govern-ment afraid of elections, the building block of democracy; and this fear, like the hope keeping it in check, is inordinate; but both are probably misplaced. If life is a series of rewards and punishments, the trust that is supposed to keep it going cannot be built in a day, nor can an election be won on the last one. Like his new clothes, which nobody sees, the emperor’s new polls will not be of any use to him now or later, because they are not there-never have been. And they are not in Morocco-never will be.