By Amara Thoronka
Gambians go to the polls on Saturday 9th April 2022 to elect national assembly representatives. As a way of knowing the voting intentions of Gambians and other related matters, the Center for Policy, Research and Strategic Studies (RepRass) recently conducted a post-presidential and pre-parliamentary elections opinion poll survey. The findings of the said opinion poll have been publicized.
Issues covered in the survey range from assessment of Government’s performance, key electoral and political matters, emerging issues on the economy, security, corruption, and the likely candidates to win in the forthcoming national assembly election.
From its findings, of the 53 parliamentary seats, the ruling National Peoples Party (NPP) are said to win 16 seats, followed by main opposition United Democratic Party (UDP) with 14 seats. The remaining seats are predicted as follow: National Reconciliation Party (NRP) 5 seats, Peoples Democratic Organization for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS) 2 seats, Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction Party (APRC) 1 seat, National Peoples Party (NPP) 2 seats, Peoples Progressive Party (PPP) 1 seat, independent candidate 4 seats. 10 seats are said to be inconclusive, meaning they are not clear whether they would be clinched by political parties or independent candidates.
The opinion poll indicates other scenarios but the overall findings show that NPP will take the lead in the National Assembly.
On people’s opinion regarding the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), 63% of respondents submitted that were satisfied with how the IEC handled the national assembly election nomination process, stressing that all candidates were treated fairly by the IEC during the nomination process.
The report also indicates that respondents’ understanding of the role of NAMs is passing bills and bringing development projects to their constituencies, despite the latter not a constitutional mandate of NAM.
Most respondents believe that more independent candidates are vying for NA elections because they have a different agenda (53%) and because of their egocentric nature (45%). Most respondents view anticorruption legislature (78%) and constitutional amendments (64%) as the most critical issues that the sixth legislature should address. While the performance of the fifth legislature was rated as good by majority of the respondents (45%), a substantial proportion of respondents (about 37%) reported that their performance was either poor or very poor.
In a pre-election survey held for last year’s presidential election, CepRass predicted that President Adama Barrow was going to win, followed by UDP’s Ousainou Darboe. It happened exacted as they predicted in their pre-election survey.
CepRass is an academic and policy research institute based in The Gambia. The Institute is mainly engaged in research, consultancy and training for private and public institutions within and outside The Gambia.
