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Of dodgy pollsters and strategic leaks
Trudy Stevenson, MP, New Zimbabwe
March 20, 2008

http://www.newzimbabwe.com/pages/electoral177.17922.html

I was interested to see the "leaked results" of the Mass Public Opinion Institute - MPOI - survey regarding who would win the Presidential election this year.

I have known MPOI since my dear late friend and colleague Professor Masipula Sithole set up the Institute some years ago.

In Mas's day, we could trust results from this institute to be a genuine reflection of whatever question was being surveyed.

Unfortunately, since then the Institute seems to have lost some of its impartiality, perhaps because one particular political party has its headquarters only two buildings away, at Harvest House.

My skepticism of the survey results published on Studio 7 and in the Zimbabwe Independent last week is based on the fact that in 2005 MPOI conducted a survey and then kept the result secret "because some of your top people didn't like it" in the words of Professor Eldred Masunungure, Director of MPOI.

The survey conducted then was a snap survey in Harare on the issue of the forthcoming Senate election. The question was whether people were in favour of MDC participating in that election. This survey was taken in September, 2005, one month before the disastrous split of the MDC over this issue.

Prof Masunungure told me, on the fringe of another encounter in early 2006, that some 75% of respondents in Harare were in favour of participating the Senate election, and that this is what "some of your top people" were not happy about. MPOI therefore suppressed that result, and the entire world was allowed to come under the impression that Zimbabweans as a whole rejected the Senate project.

This impression was false - and Morgan Tsvangirai's sudden volte face in August to reject anything to do with the Senate (when in March and April he was promising people Senate seats) was publicly supported by MPOI's silence on their findings.

So now we have MPOI declaring that Morgan Tsvangirai will win the Presidential election, with Mugabe coming second and Makoni third, while over 30% of voters still keep their vote their secret.

Since more than 30% of respondents would not say which presidential candidate they would vote for, and since even Tsvangirai got less than 30%, I do not believe this poll to be a very reliable indicator of the actual election result. Was it leaked to campaign for Tsvangirai?

*Trudy Stevenson is MP for Harare North constituency and the secretary on local government for the MDC faction led by Arthur Mutambara

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