There’s a difference between statistics (figures) and fact. The sad part is so many educated people don’t know this.
Most of the time, what we thought were facts were just statistics (numbers) and numbers can be made to represent whatever you want them to represent.
Let’s take poverty prevalence in Nigeria for instance. There are 86 million Nigerians living in poverty. Making it the poverty capital of the world. But that number represents 46.7% of the population, it was 60% a few years ago. See the difference?
By sheer number of people living in poverty, we’re leading. But as a %age of total population, we’re far from first. So which metric is better. Number of people living in poverty or %age of population living in poverty?
Let’s scale down. Is it better for only 1 of 10 people to have food or 6 of 10 people to have food? See what I did?instead of making the numbers focus on poor people, if we shift the number the other way round, things begin to look better.
What that means is in Nigeria 60% of us are doing just fine compared to say South Sudan where only 10% of them are doing just fine.
