The All Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) has said the Nextier Poll which put the Labour Party Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, ahead in the 2023 presidential race, is a “cooked up” and “far away from reality”.
The Bola Tinubu campaign’s reaction was contained in a statement on Sunday, February 05, 2023, signed by Bayo Onanuga, its Director of Media and Publicity.
What Onanuga said: While describing the organisers of the poll as “jesters”, Onanuga declared that Obi “is not a major contender in the coming presidential election in Nigeria”.
The statement reads in part: “It is important to alert Nigerians and international community that the Pollsters at Nextier are working for the Labour Party and their poll results are all cooked up, far away from reality.
“We suspect that their first and second fallacious poll results are pretext to cause political crisis and riots in Nigeria after the February 25. They may be preparing ground for violent protest by Obi supporters who will allege rigging when their candidate is roundly defeated at the election, in which he is not likely to even come a distant 3rd.
“We want to state categorically that Peter Obi is not a major contender in the coming presidential election in Nigeria and no fantasy and fairytale poll can change the material facts.”
What you should know: ANAP polls conducted between September and December 2022 twice had shown that Obi is ahead of the three other frontline candidates: Tinubu; Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP).