Museveni Team Rejects Monitor Poll

Presidential candidate Yoweri Museveni's national task force has rejected the opinion poll commissioned by The Monitor that put Museveni ahead of his main rival, Col. Dr Kizza Besigye, in the presidential race with a slim 4% margin, reports John Kakande. The task force said Museveni would win the March 7 presidential elections in the first round with more than 70% of the votes. Hajji Moses Kigongo, the chairman of Museveni's task force, and Basoga Nsadhu, the publicity secretary, last evening issued separate statements dismissing the opinion poll published in The Monitor yesterday. "The Campaign Task Force for Yoweri Museveni dismisses the opinion poll carried out by strategic PR & Research and commissioned by The Monitor. The poll is not representative at all," said a statement issued by Basoga Nsadhu. "Given the timing of the survey, it looks rather impossible to conduct 2,010 interviews, enter the date, conduct analysis in a space of six days," Basoga said. "If the sample is surely a national sample, then we assume it is well dispersed and research assistants will have to travel quite a bit if they were to follow the sampled points. Looking at just numbers, the poll suggests that at least 15 interviews were done per day, which is impossible," he said. The poll gave Museveni 47% and Besigye 43%, Aggrey Awori 4.4%, Mayanja Kibirige 3.5%, Karuhanga Chapaa 1.3% and Francis Bwengye 1.2%. The Monitor said the poll was done on the week of February 7 and the sample covered 2010 respondents and the results had a margin of error of +/-2%. Ends