Introduction: This research is aimed at harvesting and collating social media
data, open source intelligence or publicly available information on political
trends, narratives, opinion polls and employing the dataset to forecast the
likely winner in Nigeria’s forthcoming presidential election slated to take
place on February 16, 2019. Granted there are about 24 candidates in the
forthcoming presidential election but realpolitik, pragmatism implies the
election would be a two-horse race between two northern Muslims of Fulani
extraction - Atiku Abubakar (Peoples Democratic Party, PDP) and Muhammadu
Buhari (All Progressives Congress, APC). Naysayers would argue that politics is
local; that elections are not won on social media. Despite its flaws, open
source intelligence, social media and big data analytics has proven to be
veritable tools for inter-alia: predicting social unrest, economic crises, medical
epidemic, natural disasters, terrorism and also gauging the ‘political pulse’.
