Kenya is this year bracing for a change of its top leadership in elections that are held once every five years.

The country may also have a new constitution in place, views on what the people want included in the document are being collected and collated.

Elsewhere in the world, that would be the perfect recipe for public opinion polls over who will succeed the incumbent president and what the public thinks of them.

By this time, someone would have already zeroed in on the ruling Kenya African National Union's likely performance in the forthcoming polls and compared this to the past two multiparty elections. Based on these opinions, predictions would have been rolling out by the minute. 

Yet, with probably only six months to go before the elections, none of these activities taking place. Parliamentary candidates are basing their confidence on reassurances from their supporters.

The more experienced hands are counting on other factors, such as the size of their clans and wallets, or simply party affiliation, to see them through.

Public opinion polls, which are popular in the West as an alternative for participating in decision-making and forecasting behaviour, have not gained widespread acceptance in developing countries. 

And for the few who even give it a moment's thought, an opinion poll is essentially viewed as a way to draw public attention and influence public perceptions.

Not that the public is solely to blame for this state of affairs. The misconception about the real purpose of opinion polls may also have come about due to the haphazard and unreliable polls that have been carried out in recent years.

Shortly after Kenya reverted to multiparty politics in December 1991, a number of hurriedly conducted "polls" appeared in several local magazines, ostensibly to determine the most popular presidential aspirant.

Two groups, one linked to conservationist Prof Wangari Maathai, called the Middle-Ground Group (MGG), and another linked to the National Election Monitoring Unit – an umbrella for several election monitoring groups – also held their own polls.

But unlike the polls in developed countries, which are often reliable and indicative of voting trends, many of the Kenyan "polls" were arbitrary and differed significantly in their forecasts.

In fact, so different were their findings that even with a fortnight to go to the elections, no one could rely on them to predict the outcome of that year's election.

A major flaw in these pre-1992 opinion polls was their outright bias for particular candidates and mischievous disregard for universally accepted research methods.

Their projections, too, were subjective and unreliable. Unable to rely on them, many people and organisations opted instead for crude methods like observing the turnout at rallies to determine the popularity of candidates.

The MGG, for instance, conducted a "poll" in Nairobi to identify the most popular opposition candidate to take on the incumbent, President Daniel arap Moi.

But prior to the "polls," MGG members had loudly voiced their desire for opposition parties to field the late Oginga Odinga, who was running on the ticket of the Ford-Kenya party. Predictably, Odinga easily emerged as the "most popular" in the MGG polls. A decade later, this perception has hardly changed.

Opinion polls are simply a picture in time, the static measure of a dynamic entity. A proper poll must therefore first identify target respondents based on issues to be investigated. 

It must have a properly developed sample frame and appropriate sample sizes if the margins of error are to be acceptable. 

Kenya has gone through several developmental phases since independence 40 years ago.

Factors like the rapid development in news gathering and communication technologies and a growing civic awareness have also served immensely to weaken government control over the media and, in turn, opinion polls have flourished.

The result of all this is that issues like corruption, land, security, economic growth and the environment have moved to the forefront of political debate. 

But if the frequency of opinion polls has changed radically over the years, perceptions have not.

Nor has the accompanying civic awareness brought about by these polls changed the public's way of viewing issues.

Kenyans still consider personality and location to be of more importance in candidates and party preference than economic or social issues per se.

The result? Even the most scientific of opinion polls are not of much use.