Before we proceed to understand what the ramification likely are, it is instructive to note that...
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Ahead of decisive Nigeria's 2023 poll to be held on February 25, 2023, the Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has topped the search interest of the "2023 Nigerian Presidential Election", as data obtained by zeeny360.com on February 23, 2023, from Google reveal. This data is the presidential candidate search interest in various regions of Nigeria in the last 30 days.
The data shows the Presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Asiwaju Bola Tinubu with 45% of the search interests. The other candidates by order of ranking are Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) - 30%, Abubaka Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) - 22%, Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People's Party 3%.
What does this reveal about the possible outcome of the election?
Before we proceed to understand what the ramification likely are, it is instructive to note that Google Trends is not polling data. In explaining this, Google has this to say: "Google Trends is not a scientific poll and shouldn’t be confused with polling data. It merely reflects the search interest in particular topics. A spike in a particular topic does not reflect that a topic is somehow “popular” or “winning,” only that for some unspecified reason, there appear to be many users performing a search about a topic. Google Trends data should always be considered as one data point among others before drawing conclusions."
The ramifications
To better understand what the search data reveal, we have to take a peep into what the searches are. Top were terms like "efcc raid tinubu" which came up tops in the last seven days. Other searches associated with Tinubu are "400 billion"; "Makinde"; "fufu"; "Tinubu National Anthem video" among other significant terms.
For Peter Obi, the searches were about "what pastor chris said about peter obi"; "nlc endorse peter obi"; "ortom endorses peter obi" among other significant terms.
Atiku Abubaka had the following search terms "atiku five parties"; "osun sibling news"; "where is tinubu originally from" among other significant terms.
Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso searches revealed the following terms "kwankwaso endorses tinubu"; "femi falana"; "mc oluomo".
Looking at these searches, it can be seen who has more negative reasons to be searched.
Is Negative always bad?
In this era, negative vibes do not always translate to outright rejection. It would be recalled that in the 2016 United States of America general elections, Donald Trump had lots of negative vibes in the news. However, these also kept him in the news and riled up his base. Even though he didn't win the popular votes, he became the 45th President of the US. The 2020 general election, however, did not yield the same result even though a similar search pattern existed.
As it stands, a lot depends on various factors. With the lack of cash crunch bedevilling the country, the tanked economic indices, and other existing factors, the people, many of whom are not searching for the candidates on the internet, will be crucial in determining the outcome of vote buying does not influence the results that would be coming after the polls close on February 25, 2023, if there is no postponement of the polls.
Note that this data is fluid and the percentages will continue to change in real-time, hence the data embedded may not reflect the attached screenshots depending on when you view it.
Analysis by Eze Uwaezuoke (a non-partisan analyst).
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