Former Majority Leader of Parliament, Osei Kyei-Mensah Bonsu, has cautioned against conducting opinion polls or making predictions so far ahead of Ghana’s 2028 presidential election, describing such forecasts as unrealistic.
Speaking on JoyNews AM show on February 16, he said, “In politics, three years is too long a distance for you to predict that, oh, this is going to happen in three years. You’re not being realistic, if I should be blunt, because in politics, one week could even change anything.”
Kyei-Mensah Bonsu cited the example of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to illustrate the unpredictability of elections.
“I remember President Carter in the U.S. The opinion poll suggested a month before his election that he was leading by 60 percent. He was leading his opponent by 60 percent.
As the weeks and the days passed, his overwhelming margin of victory started declining. People started knowing him better. He had been a governor of Georgia. Yet the polls continued to indicate that his percentage of the margin of victory was declining.”
He continued: “To the extent that when the final week came, it declined to 52 percent. In the final days, Jimmy Carter won. He won by just, I think, 1.2 percent.”
Reflecting on the lessons for Ghana, Kyei-Mensah Bonsu warned, “Three years is too long a distance for any pollster of any sort to say that I predicted. That is not polling. That is prophecy. And I don’t believe in these prophecies anyway.”
His comments come amid growing speculation about the 2028 election.
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com