Atedo falls apart, but is he aware?

BY TESLIM AKANNI

Atedo Peterside, a banking wunderkid who later metamorphosed into an enabler of and court intellectual for a discredited and degenerate administration, hit a new low yesterday. He set a dubious record. 

In purporting to release the result of a poll commissioned by his ANAP foundation, he suspended and subverted all known protocol for releasing poll results. He withheld the full details, but selected convenient parts of his own poll and generously sprinkled those carefully picked parts over a huge serving of jeremaid. Why will an ordinarily cerebral person offer himself for such self-demystification?

Normally, the full poll results are heralded by a statement providing highlights of the survey with the overall and disaggregated findings as well as other important details such as the sample size and selection method, the mode and date of survey, and the margin of error etc, etc.

Atedo Peterside did not provide the full and disaggregated  results of his own poll, and the website of his eponymous foundation does not have the full poll results or a press statement on its findings, even as this is being written.

He sure knows the right thing to do. But doing the right thing will stand in the way of the agenda he is straining too hard and too sadly to push. Besides, he and his ilk know that they are fast running out of time, so the rush to present tendentious commentary ahead of sharing the full result. Also, he is far from being stupid. But in his desperation, he would not mind giving the impression that his readers and the rest of Nigeria are stupid.

Atedo Peterside cannot trust his readers to be able to read and understand poll results by themselves. So he must withhold the result and tell them what he thinks they need to know or how to think. Such glaring contempt and haughtiness, which by the way is not out of his character according to those who know him.

The uncomfortable truth for Atedo Peterside is that his own poll produced a result he is not happy with. His sadness clearly overwhelms him, as is evident in his tantrum of a piece. But rather that take his L in his strides, he still wants to force the issue, and he endlessly hectored his readers with opinions, laced with unmistakable bias and hatred.

Let’s be clear: Citizen Atedo Peterside is constitutionally entitled to his opinions, biases and even hatred. But using selective data as a crutch for this is intellectually lazy and plain fraudulent.

Atedo Peterside expended so much ink on the 38% Undecided, which in a strange way he frames as including not just those who have not decided on whom to vote for but also those who refuse to disclose their preference. How can the latter group be classified as Undecided except an agenda is at play? How are the mighty fallen in the service of blind agenda?

Despite his famed intelligence, Atedo Peterside could not even intelligently mask his obvious bias. Throughout the article, he did not tell us the exact percentage of his poll respondents who expressed interest in voting for President Muhammadu Buhari (except saying approximately a third of respondents) or for his closest opponent, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar (except saying Atiku lagged behind PMB).  For God’s sake, what kind of pollster or prankster is this? In this day and age?

Atedo Peterside could not bear to mention that PMB led in the poll his ANAP poll commissioned until the fourth paragraph, which he set up by harping on how PMB could still be hurt by the “whopping” number of Undecided – which he decided to sex up by adding those not disclosing their preference. But even that delayed and grudging disclosure was quickly taken away, with a tendentious caveat.

“That PMB actually had an overall lead in our polls is cold comfort for his supporters because further analysis confirms that only approximately one third of the electorate nationwide claimed to be certain to back his candidacy,” he wrote, adding: “Atiku was lagging behind PMB but the fact that the Undecided votes are concentrated outside the two zones where PMB is strongest (NW & NE) must give Atiku cause to believe that PMB’ s lead might not be unassailable after all.”

The sub-thesis of Atedo Peterside’s contortions is right there in that statement: even when PMB is ahead, Atiku can still catch up. Even in rendering that, he chose to be disrespectful and disingenuous. How did he ascertain that PMB’s supporters derived cold comfort from the result of a poll they had not seen? So much for working to an answer.

His main purpose for scripting this rushed apologia is to launch a desperate campaign for Atiku. He made it clear this is his preferred choice, especially as there is no south-south candidate on the ballot. A man is entitled to his preference, his economic worldview and his irridentism. The PMB demolition job that followed, which spins around beer parlor and WhatsApp gossip, can be situated in that context.

But Citizen Atedo clearly unravelled when he desperately hawked this ludicrous prescription to Candidate Atiku: acknowledge your sinful past, say you are born again, and coast to victory. Five days to presidential election, you want Nigerians to think differently of a man who built a reputation over two decades and recently cemented it by saying he will enrich his friends when he gets to power again? SERIOUSLY?  It is either this man thinks Nigerians are very stupid or he has, without being forced, shown how over-rated he has been all along. How did Atedo Peterside fall apart and is not even aware?

Akanni sent this article from Ibadan.