Victor Ezeja
As presidential aspirants across political parties gear up for the 2023 elections, former governor of Anambra State, Mr. Peter Obi who is contesting on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has emerged as the most preferred presidential candidate by Nigerians, followed by Prof. Yemi Osinbajo of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
This was revealed in a pre-election survey conducted by Nextier, an international development advisory firm based in Nigeria, and Data-Tier, a data analytics and digital communications company, to ascertain Nigerians’ preferences for a presidential candidate and issues that would shape the election like ethnicity or region and gender biases.
The survey also tried to find out the challenges Nigerian electorates would like the presidential candidates to address when elected in February 2023.
According to the survey report, the data gathered from 467 responses on the most preferred candidate indicated that Peter Obi scored 46 percent, Nigeria’s vice president, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, 28 percent, Bola Tinubu (7.5 percent) and Atiku Abubakar (3 percent).
The survey asked the respondent to rank 15 candidates listed in options in their Most Preferred and Least Preferred order. Peter Obi and Yemi Osinbajo were the most preferred candidates, while Bola Tinubu and Abubakar Malami were the least preferred candidates.
The poll also gauged the preferences of Nigerians based on their regions and found that Southerners preferred Obi (51.2 per cent), and Osinbajo (26.6 percent), while the mostly preferred candidates by respondents from the North are in this order: Osinbajo (34.2 percent), Obi (20 percent), and Musa Kwankwaso (13.2 percent).
The most preferred vice presidential candidates are Aminu Tambuwal (28.05 percent), Musa Kwankwaso (19.27 percent), and Peter Obi (16.27 percent), while none of the other
candidates secured more than seven percent of the votes.
Analysis of the survey responses on the most critical development challenges that Nigerians are mostly concerned with which they want any of the candidates that will be elected to tackle, showed that insecurity topped the chat. Three out of ten Nigerians (34.1 percent) indicated that insecurity is the most critical challenge in the country. This is followed by weak economic growth (22.1 percent) and national disunity which ranked third (13.92 percent). Poverty (11.99 percent), unemployment (10.28 per cent), high cost of living (6.64 per cent), and hunger (1.07 percent) were the other critical development issues.
On gender, over 86 percent the respondents indicated that they would vote for a competent woman as president of the country.
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist with seven years of experience writing on economy, politics and energy. He holds a Master's degree in Mass Communication.
