LAHORE: Surveys projecting the comparative popularity of political parties and their leaders should not only be credible but also perceived to be so, and the latest Gallup Pakistan survey does not fulfil this requirement, said Mian Manzoor Ahmed Wattoo in a statement issued by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Secretariat.
The former federal minister was referring to a recent Gallup Pakistan survey, which concluded that a majority of Pakistanis believe that the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government is running the country better.
Wattoo claims that 12 to 18 hours of power outage, inflation and the rise in crimes are enough to discredit the survey.
He also singled out the Punjab Youth Festival, arguing that substantial funds were spent on something ‘futile’.
The three-time former chief minister of Punjab also stated that the survey implicitly discredits the governance in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), where, according to him, the public’s approval rating was more than 57%.
Calling into question the mechanism of conducting the survey, the statement said that it was easy to manipulate the results through the framing of the questions. The PPP claims that the survey seems to have employed such measures to obtain “pre-determined conclusions” to favour one party over others.
Wattoo maintained that the “sponsored assessment” was not going to help the government, suggesting that it should focus its attention on solving the problems of the people.
He also stated that the public was not better off now than it was during the PPP government when at least goods of common use were available at moderate process, and there was no domestic load shedding of gas.