Our opinion polling has come of age

Kenya’s opinion pollsters are busy people where politicians are not only busybodies, but are also immersed in busywork.

Synovate (formerly Steadman), Infotrack and Harris (formerly Infotrack), Strategic PR and Research, Consumer Insight and Research International, among others, poll opinion on varied issues that span Kenya’s political, social and economic strata.

Kenya’s leading corporations, government agencies, non-governmental organisations, international organisations, lobby groups, political parties and individuals commission these firms to poll opinion for them on varied developments and trends in their worlds.

The corporations, organisations and individuals use this information to define and refine their strategies, position or reposition themselves, improve their products, fine-tune their messages and sharpen their offensive and defensive skills in penetrating new turfs and meeting targets.

Opinion pollsters also gather opinions for themselves on matters of public interest and make this public to, and through, the media.

They gather opinions from samples that are often random with a view to determining as closely as possible what the view of the populace is on a given prevailing or burning issue at the time.

Samples of Kenyan people, for example, are asked their views on an issue and given varied choices to choose from with a view to determining what the popular opinion is.

It is the work of pollsters to analyse data so collected and collated and interpret this for their clients, themselves or public.

Where opinion on an issue is sought by a client, this information is given exclusively to the client because the client commissioned it and is paying for it.

Where pollsters carry out this on their own because it is in the public interest, they make this public through the media.

A media house, for example, can commission a pollster to poll opinion on a given issue and can carry this exclusively as news.

Synovate makes available to subscribing media houses their performance in the market and, while this is kept away from the public, it is hugely important information for the media.

But it is the polling of opinion on our politics that arouses the most interest among the reading, viewing and listening public. It raises temperatures and cudgels in the political arena and solicits the most cacophonous and acrimonious exchanges.

It is this that brings us to the latest Synovate opinion poll which concluded that 47 per cent of Kenyans would vote for Prime Minister Raila Odinga if a presidential poll were held today.

All others were reduced to pretenders to the throne and it is this that has raised the hackles of some politicians against opinion polling.

For the second time, gemstone magnate Johnstone Muthama asked a crowd at a rally if their opinion had been sought.

Clearly, if two or even 10 had said they had, he would have thundered into the microphone that they were a minority.

Of course, Muthama, it is all about samples, sampling! And pollsters make it clear the number of people polled and most of the time it is between 2,000 and 3,000 at a certain specific time and in specific areas.

An MP at the same rally claimed that some people were paying pollsters to portray them in good light and, by extension, diminish their rivals.

But please Peter Mwathi, pollsters make it clear who commissions the polls and, the best part of this is that they have been consistent on the matter of Raila being in the lead.

Gichugu MP Martha Karua claimed the polls were being used to condition Kenyans into believing that somebody – read Raila – is the choice of the people of Kenya. Watch the ballot, she said.

Please, consistency is not conditioning. True, Karua, come 2012 the polls could present a very different picture.
Lastly, during the referendum, the minister for Information, Mr Samuel Poghisio, said that every Tom, Dick and Harry could carry out an opinion poll. No.

In fact, it is the ‘No’ campaign which claimed to have carried out its own poll which showed it was winning. I have mentioned above the country’s leading pollsters.

Good people, the point is that politicians, Raila included, love opinion polls when they bespeak good things about them. They pretend not to believe them when they are unfavourable.

Remember politicians have concocted opinion polls previously with a view to swaying the public which means they believe in the power of opinion polling. The problem is they would want polls that tell them what they want to hear.

Unfortunately for the politicians, opinion polling by the above pollsters is professional and has come of age.

Kwendo Opanga is a media consultant [email protected]