6th April, 2011
Quadri Abubakar, the initiator of the Nigerianopinion.com, an online polling platform gauging the preferences of the electorate for candidates in the general elections, speaks with TOKUNBO OLAJIDE about the importance of opinion polls
Tell us about the idea behind your opinion poll platform, the Nigerianopinion.com?
It is a public opinion poll via short messaging system, SMS, and online voting. It was conceived late last year as an avenue to gauge public opinion on their choice of presidential and governorship candidates. As it has been demonstrated in developed worlds, we believe opinion polls are crucial to engaging the citizens to participate actively in the electioneering process. We designed the online platform to display the profiles of all the presidential candidates and some governorship candidates too. It was thrown open: the candidates were allowed to upload their profiles there, including their manifestoes. The public can thus go online, see the profiles and have first hand information about the different contestants. They can thus assess them and poll based on their personal convictions about the candidates. There are two aspects to the voting, online, and SMS.
We have in place measures to guide against multiple voting, whereby loyalists of the candidates being voted for online may just sit back somewhere before a computer and start to punch all day for their preferred candidates. What we did was to design a system in which when you click to vote, you have to enter your phone number, your state and your age, before you’ll now vote proper. When you do that, a code is automatically sent to the phone number you entered and you are then required to enter the code to complete your voting. Once that is done, you can’t use that phone number to vote on the platform for a second time. If you attempt it, your number will be rejected. Voting is also possible through SMS whereby you send your state of residence, age, candidates and user name to a short code, 33810. The way the programme has been designed, you can’t vote online and still vote via SMS. You can either choose from the SMS or online option.
When someone votes via SMS, it goes from the network to the aggregator (short code SMS operator who is the intermediary between us and the network) who now sends us the posting of the vote. We have a programme that then goes into the database and fetches the entry and allocate it to the profile of the person you voted for. And all these are done in Real Time. This is what makes our own kind of SMS voting unique. We don’t just collate the results or just come up with any fictitious figures through the backdoor.
Talking of multiple voting, do you think your system is full-proof enough, especially because one person can procure several phone lines and use it for multiple voting?
Until the commencement of the compulsory SIM card registration ordered by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, that would have been possible. If you buy a SIM card now, you can’t use it to call until you register it to your name. And once that is done, it prevents you from using it for such purposes of multiple voting because you have your name to it.
And mind you, even though this idea was conceived late last year, we only commenced online poll proper in March this year. Whereas the SIM card registration thing took effect a month earlier, in February. So, that safeguard is there to prevent multiple voting on the platform.
When you set up this platform, what major objective did you set out to achieve with respect to the political process?
It was primarily meant as a platform for the electorate to get to know their candidates better and indicate their preferences through the opinion poll. It is meant to inform and educate. If you asked some people how many presidential candidates there are, they only remember just the top four contenders, whereas there are more than 18 of them. One the Nigerianopinion.com website, we have the full list of all the candidates and their profiles.
Who is funding the project and what would you gain in the whole exercise, because you have been committing funds to advertise the platform and also keep it up and running?
Nigerianopinion.com is privately funded by ACL Global Consult, my outfit. We do not have any additional funding from any interest outside. Though when set out to begin the project, we did not intend to fund it alone all the way; we sought for sponsors. However, so far we’ve not got very good responses.
We even went as far as contacting the European Commission about the project. We offered to handover the control panel of the site where the voting programme can be moderated and controlled. The intention was to remove any shred of doubt about our personal interest or bias in the opinion poll. We thought it wise that if a neutral body like the European Commission could take over its running, it would further give the project a high level of credibility. But the commission responded by declining our request. The reason they gave was that the agreement they had with the Nigerian government and INEC was just to observe the elections, not moderating any opinion poll.
We also intimated the USAID and the British Council, but they only commended our effort. Also, in some advertorials we published, we informed electoral observer groups and NGOs to come forward to be part of the running of the platform. Our intention was to make the process as transparent as possible. We have nothing to hide nor are we interested in who leads or is not leading in the polls. We have no affiliations whatsoever with any of the candidates or political parties.
The poll has been on for weeks now, what has been the response. What has been the level of traffic drawn to the site?
As at the last week of March, we had over 75,000 visitors to the site but only over 3,000 people voted. And the presidency was where we had the most response. We’ve been publishing periodic reports of the votes, highlighting the demographics like the state, the age of the pollsters and the number of total polls. And we have a feedback segment where anyone who has reservations about the polls or suggestions on how to improve it can write us and we’ll attend to their concerns.
Do you think the few thousands that have voted in the opinion poll is representative enough, given Nigeria’s voter population of over 70 million as registered by INEC?
I cannot say this is the opinion of the entire population. This is just a survey based on the number of people who participated. The responses we’ve got have been from across the 36 states and across different demographics. Though most of the voter participation have come from Lagos; we also recorded appreciable participation from Abuja, Katsina, Kaduna, Oyo, Ogun and Rivers States, especially in the polls for the top three presidential candidates.