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Statistical Services, research and monitoring consultants, who released an opinion polls on Monday that the UDF will win the May 18 elections, have said that if the Mgwirizano Coalition and the problems in the Malawi Congress Party which led to the birth of the Republican Party were taken into account, the whole poll would have been different.
Managing director Mathews Ngwale said on Monday in an interview that the inclusion of MCP as a party that has split and the formation of the Coalition could have affected the outcome of the opinion poll but that is not the case because the Republican Party and the Mgwirizano were formed after the poll had gone through Southern region.
“Of course if these were put into consideration, the result would not have been the same. For instance MCP is split as it stands today. That would have changed the MCP standing in the poll. If we were to take another poll now, the outcome will not be the same,” Ngwale said.
But in the report, Ngwale gave a different reason on the Mgwirizano coalition. He said: “In our survey the UDF still perceived to have the best chance of winning the elections followed by the MCP, NDA, Mafude, PPM, Aford. What emerged from this is that there is a strong identity of parties in their individual capacity rather than as groupings.
“For example the UDF and Aford have formed an alliance, respondents still identify them as individual entities. Similarly, Mgwirizano coalition is identified within the nexus of the separate political entities that make the grouping rather than as a collective.”
The poll found out that the UDF had a 54.6 percent chance of winning the May 18 elections, followed by MCP with 17.2 percent and then NDA with 13.3 percent, Mafunde 6.9 percent, PPM got 3.1 percent and Aford got 2.2 percent chances of wining.
But on Monday, the Malawi Congress Party and the National Democratic Alliance described the poll as fake and meant to cheat the electorate into believing that the UDF is popular.
NDA’s director of publicity Salule Masangwi a statistics lecturer at the University of Malawi accused Ngwale of doctoring figures which he cannot justify.
“In 1994 the UDF got about 47 percent of the national vote at the polls, and in 1999 the UDF got 51 percent when it was intact. It defies all logic, therefore, that the survey can claim this time around that the UDF has a popularity of 56 percent when NDA has been introduced in the system with more than 80 percent of its supporters coming from the UDF,” Masangwi said.
Masangwi claimed that they had inside information that the results released to the public were not correct because UDF become third in the poll.
“We have been told that this also happened in 1999 where the polls predicted about 49 percent for Muluzi and about 47 percent for MCP/Aford alliance. Statistically, with a 3 percent marginal error, there was virtually no difference between Muluzi and Chakuamba, However, when reporting to the press and the public, the poll alleged 60 percent for Muluzi and this meant that Muluzi should have obtained a national vote in the range of 57 percent to 63 percent,” he explained.
Ngwale dismissed NDA’s claims that he has cooked up the figures saying that there is no other report apart from the one distributed to the media.
“And any case, have our so called cooked up polls been any different from the results in 1999? We predicated that and the UDF won, so what are they talking about?” he said.
MCP spokesperson Nicholas Dausi accused the UDF of funding the poll to cheat the masses in rural areas and make them believe that the UDF is still popular.
“With all this hunger, jobs lost because of privatisation, and when UDF is in its worst in terms of popularity, how can they have a chance to win an election?” he said.
But Ngwale said that the survey was funded by an undisclosed company because “we are in the business of doing surveys.”
In the questionnaire, the poll asked respondents to answer one specific question only to MCP and UDF. Respondents were asked to respondents on what they should expect the MCP and the UDF to do to win an election.
On this Ngwale explained that the questions were deliberately targeted at the two parties because they are the only parties that did well in the 1999 elections which saw Muluzi and UDF emerge winners.
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