Osun Voters Go to Poll with Less Than 10% Informed Campaign Issues from 5 Parties

With less than 24 hours until the Osun 2022 governorship election, the non-governmental organization, Positive Agenda Nigeria, which has been observing political actors’ campaign activities since April, revealed that more than 1 million voters are anticipated at different polling places across the state, and they will choose their preferred candidate with less than 10% of informed campaign issues. This was one of the findings from the organization’s final weekly report on how parties, candidates, and supporters had interacted with the general public and prospective voters between April 6 and July 13, 2022.

The five political parties that engaged the electorate most frequently during the campaign period were the People Democratic Party, the All Progressives Congress, the Labour Party, Accord and the Social Democratic.

According to the report “A total of 737 traces of informed policy engagement were discovered. Less than 10% of the total was highly informed policy engagement. This indicates that parties, media handlers and supporters deployed moderately and slightly informed policy engagement metrics. According to our analysis, 38.80% of the total traces (n=737) were moderately informed policy engagement while 53.32% were slightly informed policy engagement. Further analysis of the levels of policy engagement across campaign issues and/or policies shows mixed results for others as a category. Parties and their supporters slightly and highly engaged potential electorate when discussing infrastructure, health, and workers’ welfare, salary and employment.”

“Out of all the political parties contesting tomorrow’s governorship election in the state, only two of them, the APC and the PDP, recorded the highest campaign messages across the five communication media types (Facebook, Twitter, Newspapers, Radio jingles and Campaign speeches) we monitored from day one to the 69th day of the monitoring exercise. Forty-two-point eighty percent (42.80%) went to the APC while the PDP took 43.10%. Accord, Labour Party and SDP shared the remaining percentage. One of the main implications of our findings this week is that the political parties, especially the two major parties, greatly believed in defending their candidates than the rate they defended them and their policies in weeks eight and nine. As they defended, they equally promised potential electorates what they would do better should they are voted for tomorrow.

This shows that the political parties understand that defenses and acclaims are two strong strategies that can help them persuade voters before tomorrow’s election— the closer the election, the more the strategies are deployed. Still, verbal attacks did not stop, and those attacks were more prominent on Facebook and Twitter than on the other three media types monitored. Like the previous two weeks, the parties were also confident of emerging victorious in tomorrow’s election, though they kept urging voters to vote for them. Aside from the canvassing, the parties, their supporters and the media team kept selling the competencies of their candidates to the potential electorate,” the report added.

The group recommends that the security agencies intensify their efforts in ensuring that perpetrators of violence do not go scot-free, especially now that physical political attacks have become constant in the state. “We also advise political actors in the state to place national peace and objective over their personal political goals and interests. Also, security agencies, corrupt practices and financial crimes control and management commissions should consider preparing strategic intelligence from research-based results like this towards addressing vote-buying and selling effectively before and during the poll.”

The full report is available here for download.