By Ibraheem Dooba
“A well-wrapped statistic,” said Darrell Huff, six decades ago, “is
better than Hitler’s “big lie”; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on
you.” So, to save the ordinary citizen from the mischievous use of
statistics, Huff deemed it fit to teach regular folks how to do wicked
statistics, hence his book, How to Lie with Statistics.
Here’s how Huff defended his project: “This book is a sort of primer
in ways to use statistics to deceive. It may seem altogether too much
like a manual for swindlers. [But] the crooks already know these tricks;
honest men must learn them in self-defence.”
Unlike Huff, I wouldn’t (and can’t) cover all the angles people
employ to deceive with statistics. Like him, however, it is a concern
seeing how people abuse statistics and deploy them as a weapon to tell
lies. So I propose to share three tips of how to spot a bad statistic.
What is the baseline?
Seeing that it hasn’t fulfilled any shining promise, our government
distributes and publishes statistics and makes nothing of the baselines.
But you can use that to catch them. For example, if I present a report
that says HIV kills six million people per year in Lagos, you can ask
one question to quickly discover I couldn’t be telling the truth: what
is the total number of people who die yearly from all causes (from
accidents, cancer, of natural causes, etc.) in Lagos? If the answer is
less than six million people per year, you’d know that statistic is a
lie. It’s the baseline technique that Obasanjo’s minister of
agriculture, Adamu Bello, used to expose the lies of Jonathan’s minister
of agriculture, Dr. Akinwumi Adesina.
Before then, the man and his ministry overwhelmed us with statistics,
“We ended 40 years of fertiliser corruption in 90 days,” they informed
us. Also, ‘the growth that the Jonathan administration has engendered in
the agriculture sector is unprecedented’. It happened that this was a
complete fabrication.
Sharing data from the National Bureau of Statistics and the Central
Bank of Nigeria, Adamu Bello argued that instead of growth, there has
been a decline in the sector since Obasanjo left office. Statistics show
that between 2003 and 2007, when Obasanjo left office, the growth in
the agriculture sector averaged 6.85 percent per annum. The growth
started declining immediately after he left office. And in 2013, under
Jonathan, growth in the sector was 4.5 percent; the government failed
its own target of 8.0 percent growth.
Also, the ministry of agriculture was simply being mischievous when
it said that it eliminated N26 billion annual corruption in fertiliser
distribution. Using the same baseline technique, we can ask what the
total budget for fertiliser per year was in those years. That was what
Adamu Bello did. The answer may surprise you: N3 billion!
How can you steal 26 from 3? Bello said the total subsidy between
1999 and 2007 was under N25billion. “This can be verified from the
Budget Office of the Federal Ministry of Finance,” he said.
Another baseline question, if N870 billion fertiliser subsidy was
embezzled in 40 years, what was the total budget for agriculture for
those years?
Adamu Bello doubted if the entire budget for the ministry of
agriculture was up to that amount. “To claim that there was subsidy of
N870 billion spent on fertilisers, since the use of fertilisers was
initially encouraged by the government about 40 years ago, is most
unfair, as I doubt if the entire agricultural budgets for the whole
period was up to that sum,” he said.
Dr. Adesina knew he could no longer win with statistics, so he
changed tactics. He challenged Adamu Bello to tell the citizens his
achievements in seven years as minister of agriculture.
“Bello never told Nigerians the truth about his actual performance in
office. Let him give details commodity-by-commodity, and let him state
where and how this impact was felt,” Adesina said through his assistant
on media, Oyeleye Olukayode.
Under a better president, Adesina could be a good agriculture
minister. However, what we get from the ministry now is too much noise
and a good deal of initiatives and acronyms: phone for farmers,
e-wallet, Growth Enhancement Scheme (GES), Youth Employment in
Agriculture Programme (YEAP), Fund for Agricultural Finance in Nigeria
(FAFIN), NIRSAL, and so forth. As a result, we’re confused and
overwhelmed.
What is the method?
Imagine Daily Trust has four columnists – Mohammed Haruna,
Adamu Adamu, Mahmud Jega and Ibraheem Dooba. Respectively, they make N3
million, N2 million, N1 million and N5 million per month. What is their
average monthly pay? If we add all the money together and divide by 4,
we get N2.75 million. From here we can draw a conclusion that a Daily Trust columnist belongs to the middle class.
What if, however, Dangote starts writing for Daily Trust?
Now, the paper has five columnists, but Dangote also brings his income
of, say, N100 million per month. If we add all the five monthly pays
together and divide by the five writers, we get N22.2 million per month.
Now, we can say a Daily Trust columnist is a rich man. Is this
conclusion valid? Yes. But the method that led to the conclusion is
flawed. When we have numbers that are too high or low (outliers) in a
data set, statisticians advise us to take the median not the mean.
Now, if we do the calculation again using the median, we’ll get an
entirely different result. To do that, we arrange the numbers in
ascending order: N1m, N2m, N3m, N5m and N100m. Now we take the middle
number, which is N3 million. Which is quite close to what we figured
earlier before Dangote crashed the party – and a far cry from N22m per
month.
So when a politician gives you an average that sounds suspicious, you can ask which average he chose.
The Bureau of Statistics demonstrated recently the importance of
appropriate method selection in statistical analysis. Sokoto State was
the poorest state in Nigeria, it said. Niger State was the least poor.
In response, the governor of Sokoto State, Magartarda Wamako, stepped
forward, breathing fire: “An agency that failed to conduct a proper
survey on what we have been doing as government to mop up the rate of
unemployment in the state should not attempt to misinform Nigerians and
the rest of the world that Sokoto is the poorest state in Nigeria with
81.2 per cent rate. Such a rating is unthinkable, utterly incorrect and
misinforming,” the Punch newspaper reported him as saying on January 14.
It took NBS almost three weeks to deny the reports that it rated Sokoto State as the poorest state in Nigeria. On January 25, ThisDay
published a statement from Dr. Yemi Kale, the statistician general,
addressed to the chambers of Dr. Alex Iziyon (SAN), the lawyer to the
Sokoto State Government.
I was confused further when last month, at a retreat organised by the
gubernatorial campaign council of Niger State APC, officials from the
Governors’ Forum told us during a presentation that Niger is one of the
poorest states in the country. The conclusions of the bureau and that of
the Governors’ Forum, while measuring the same thing, are at the
opposite ends of the spectrum.
When I asked the question, the Governors’ Forum said they are using a
method completely different from the one the statistics bureau used.
Instead of measuring income alone, they also measured other indicators
of well-being such as health, education status, etc.
So if it sounds fishy, ask for the method.
Is it a lie?
When some conclusions are drawn from statistics, you immediately know
that they are lies. A recent example of this is the recalculation of
our GDP. President Jonathan and his mutual admiration society usually
imply that the president grew our GDP to 500 billion dollars. No. He did
not.
Recalculating is different from creating. Take for example, if the
value of the products in my village’s weekly market had not been
calculated for many years (even after its expansion) until now, and it’s
found that the current value is far higher than what was calculated
several years before, are we going to credit the incumbent chairman for
this achievement even though there were many chairmen who contributed to
the growth of the market before him?
Credit the incumbent, Jonathanians say: “Buhari’s shameful past is
dwarfed by the achievements of Goodluck Jonathan. Under Jonathan,
Nigeria has emerged as by far the largest economy in Africa with a GDP
of $503 billion; nearly double the previous estimates,” Femi Aribisala
wrote.
When Jideofor Adibe, a Daily Trust columnist, implied the
same thing, I immediately threw away 70 percent of the respect I had for
him; and I’m now sussing him out on the remaining 30 percent.
Actually, the Economist argued that the Nigerian economy is
growing not because of Jonathan but in spite of him: “The single bright
spot of his rule has been Nigeria’s economy, one of the world’s
fastest-growing. Yet that is largely despite the government rather than
because of it, and falling oil prices will temper the boom. The
prosperity has not been broadly shared: under Mr Jonathan poverty has
increased. Nigerians typically die eight years younger than their poorer
neighbours in nearby Ghana.”
So next time you feel you’re being conned with numbers, ask yourself the three foregoing questions.
Let’s end the way we started, with a wise counsel from Darrell Huff:
“But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding
and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic
nonsense.”
Ibraheem Dooba, Ph.D, is a data scientist.
Source: premiumtimesng
No comments:
Post a Comment