President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has narrowly placed ahead of Peter Obi in the latest Oxford-Metro Analytics National Trust Poll conducted ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 presidential election.
Tinubu secured 24,469 responses, representing 35.41 per cent, while Obi recorded 23,402 responses, representing 33.86 per cent.
Former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar came third with 18,430 responses, or 26.67 per cent.
The difference between Tinubu and Obi was just 1,067 responses, equivalent to approximately 1.54 percentage points, in a poll that recorded 69,110 approved and unflagged responses before it closed on September 7, 2026.
How the candidates performed
Candidate| Responses| Percentage
Bola Tinubu| 24,469| 35.41%
Peter Obi| 23,402| 33.86%
Atiku Abubakar| 18,430| 26.67%
Others/remaining options| 2,809| 4.06%
Total| 69,110| 100%
No candidate secured a majority of the responses.
Tinubu leads in 21 reporting areas
Tinubu recorded the highest number of responses in 21 of the 37 state/FCT reporting areas, according to the final state-level breakdown reported from the poll.
His leading areas were:
- Benue
- Borno
- Delta
- Ekiti
- Gombe
- Jigawa
- Kaduna
- Kano
- Katsina
- Kogi
- Kwara
- Lagos
- Niger
- Ogun
- Ondo
- Osun
- Oyo
- Plateau
- Rivers
- Zamfara
- Federal Capital Territory
Tinubu’s largest state-level tally came from Lagos, where he recorded 9,265 responses out of 21,956, representing 42.20 per cent.
Obi leads in eight states
Peter Obi recorded the highest number of responses in:
- Abia
- Anambra
- Bayelsa
- Cross River
- Ebonyi
- Edo
- Enugu
- Imo
Some of Obi’s strongest state-level results were recorded in the South-East. He received 582 of 585 responses in Ebonyi, 247 of 251 in Anambra, and 569 of 666 in Abia.
Atiku leads in eight states
Atiku Abubakar led in:
- Adamawa
- Akwa Ibom
- Bauchi
- Kebbi
- Nasarawa
- Sokoto
- Taraba
- Yobe
His strongest results came from Kebbi, where he recorded 661 of 662 responses, and Nasarawa, where he received 590 of 599 responses.
What happened across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones?
The poll produced a sharply divided regional picture.
North-West: Tinubu led with 4,129 responses (43.10%).
North-East: Atiku dominated with 1,235 responses (55.46%).
North-Central: Tinubu led with 6,370 responses (36.97%), followed by Obi with 5,364.
South-West: Tinubu was dominant with 10,968 responses (43.53%).
South-East: Obi recorded his strongest regional performance with 5,796 responses (63.97%).
South-South: Obi also led with 2,389 responses (41.48%).
Three areas produced particularly close contests
The poll also recorded some extremely narrow state-level margins.
In Kogi, Tinubu received 39 responses against Atiku’s 38 — a difference of only one response.
In the FCT, Tinubu led Obi by 321 responses, recording 5,599 against Obi’s 5,278.
In Rivers, Tinubu polled 975 against Obi’s 892, giving him a margin of 83 responses.
What does the poll mean for 2027?
The figures suggest that the political contest being captured by the Oxford-Metro platform is highly competitive, with Tinubu and Obi separated by only a small national margin and Atiku maintaining a significant third position.
However, the figures should not be presented as a prediction that Tinubu would win the 2027 presidential election.
Oxford-Metro describes its exercise as an open, voluntary and self-selected online public-pulse poll, rather than a probability-based scientific opinion survey. It does not use the type of representative sampling and weighting normally required to project an election outcome.
The distribution of participation is also uneven. Lagos and the FCT accounted for a very substantial proportion of the responses, while some states had relatively small numbers of participants. Consequently, the results are better understood as showing how participants on the Oxford-Metro platform voted, rather than how all Nigerian voters intend to vote in 2027.
With the national gap between Tinubu and Obi standing at only 1.54 percentage points in this exercise, however, the poll provides another indication of how closely contested the political conversation around the 2027 presidential election has become.