Mutharika is frontrunner, says Malawi leading statistician: Ipor survey faulted

A leading academician and statistician at Chancellor College (Chanco)—a constituent college of the University of Malawi — has said indications are clear that President Peter Mutharika will be re-elected next week and dismissed as flawed a survey which has put Lazarus Chakwera of  Malawi Congress Party (MCP).

Dr. Jimmy Namangale has said  the survey —conducted by the Zomba-based Institute of (Ipor) between April 25 and June 3— which gives Chakwera  report lacks objectivity and professionalism that characterize a credible research finding.

“They failed to study human behavior, a component which is critical in any opinion research,”  said the academician.

Namangale said  to the contrary, Mutharika of the DPP-UDF alliance is the frontrunner and likely  to win the poll.

According to the statistician,  Ipor erred by using the same sample size across the country’s geographical reasons despite the regions having different populations and different numbers of registered voters.

Namangale also indicated that that the 2019  annulled presidential election was not rigged but was only marred by irregularities, insinuating that the 2020 result may not be different from that of 2029 where President Peter Mutharika was declared winner.

Director of research at Ipor, Boniface Dulani, said they respect  Namangale as “a fellow academic” but said his argument  also has  “mathematical errors.”

In his scrutiny of the Ipor results, Namangale states: ” It may likely be another close contest than Ior has reported but it does seem DPP has a slightly upper hand to have more votes. The 50%+1  [majority] may even fail if the third candidate manages to get votes close to the deficit threshold talked about above.

“Otherwise, it is very unrealistic think of DPP/UDF support to have declined considerably, these are likely to be the majority of the respondents that are not willing to air their choices.”

In politics and election race, a day is longer for one to hit or miss it.