ACCRA, October 23 -- Mr. J.A. Kufour, Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party has come out tops in a survey conducted by journalists in Accra last week. The survey was part of an exercise undertaken by the journalists attending a course at the British Council on the chances of the presidential candidates in Election 2000. Out of the three hundred and sixty people who were sampled in the citywide exercise, Kufour scored 35.1%, followed by Professor John Atta Mills of the NDC with 15.1%. The CPP candidate, Professor Hagan made an impressive showing with 10.6%. The areas covered by the poll included Tema, Tudu, Adabraka, Weija, La, Bukom, Kwashieman, Abeka La Paz and the general environs of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.
The rest of the scores were as follows: Goosie Tanoh of NRP 8.8%, Dr Edward Mahama of PNC, 5.2%, DR Charles Wereko-Broddy of UGM, 3.8%, and Dan Lartey of GCPP, 1.8%. 8.5% said they did not know, and 9.8% said they would not vote at all.
The journalists who undertook the survey, under the supervision of Graham Jones of CNN and Donald Wintersgill of Thompson Foundation, were drawn from both the state and independent sectors. They were attending a course organized by the British Council and Thompson Foundation on “bridging the gap between journalists and politicians”. The course ended last Friday, October 20, 2000.
The survey also revealed the following figures on the reasons behind the choices: Economy 62.5%, Education 41.4%, Health 26.1%, Jobs/Employment 21.2%, Ethnicity 20.2%, Development 17.5%, Agriculture 12.8%, Security, law, order & change 12.8%. To be accepted as credible, respondents should not fall below 300 in number.
Women, it was discovered, were not particularly keen to participate in the poll. Some men were equally hostile to some of the pollsters, describing the activity as an NDC ploy. The trend of the poll itself seems to suggest that there is credibility in the widely held conventional wisdom that the ruling party will not do well in the urban centres.
Goosie’s performance of 8.8%, said some of the journalists, may also have been taken from the NDC, pointing yet again to the veracity of another conventional wisdom that Goosie’s NRP, may yet do much bodily harm to the NDC in Election 2000.
The Accra Mail’s Abdul-Rahman Alhassan, who participated in the exercise said during analysis of the figures some participants expressed amazement at the gap between Kufour and Mills, but after the analysis, the “Goosie Effect” was seen as the main factor.
Though opinion polling is not widespread in Ghana, in the advanced democracies, such polls form a credible yardstick in determining outcomes of all manner of political social, and economic activities.
The different political parties and politicians continue to exhibit the confidence of winners, traversing the length and breadth of the country to hold “mammoth” rallies and claim the panacea to all of Ghana’s problems. The political parties themselves find in “mammoth rallies” their kind of opinion poll. Those who can afford it, spend huge sums of money bussing people to their rallies, and even those who cannot afford it, hold up the “huge numbers” that turn out as evidence of their acceptance by the electorate. As the elections draw closer, we shall see even bigger mammoth rallies by all the political parties.
