Lagos -based pollster and CEO of Datavision Limited, Mfon Eyoma, has said that polling has multiple benefits for our democracy, especially in the developing nations like Nigeria.
Eyoma, a chartered accountant and ex-banker, said in a statement issued in Lagos that polling creates the avenue for public participation and a sense of involvement, especially in governance when leveraged by honest politicians.
He said: “Polling focuses political discourse on a topical issue and helps politicians assess public opinion and guide policy. In advanced democracies, the ballot routinely incorporates polling for so much public opinion on other issues that it can be rightly considered a national or state referendum”.
According to Eyoma, “Besides its obvious application in the development of campaign strategy, polling is useful for formulating political ideology and public policy in a nascent democracy such as ours, and because they can be conducted for any purpose, they are a veritable tool not only in politics but also in business”.
He explained that when polls are conducted by a specialist, the outcome is incontrovertible because it is backed by factual data.
“Our electoral system is still manual, and our telephone and postal systems were too poor to support traditional research methods of telephone surveys and questionnaires until about 2002. Our manual electoral system was further compounded by widespread irregularities and outright fraud so that ballot papers were not only unreliable by inaccessible to psephologists for any meaningful post-election analysis”.
Mr. Eyoma, who promised to use Datavision to help enhance the integrity of the 2019 polls, explained the operations of his methods in detail.
Mfon Eyoma is a chartered accountant with 26 years’ experience in auditing, accounting, financial and management consulting, corporate finance, risk management, business management and political polling. He has worked for a combined total of 16 years at the foremost professional services firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), 4 years at a bank, 6 years in entrepreneurship (3 years each at a telecom service company and in his multidisciplinary consultancy, Datavision).