Nigerians With Their Statistics

One of the things I am interested in was statistics (stats). You could say I was a follower of a statement Jay-Z made popular, "Men lie women lie, numbers don't". Numbers derived from stats is the closest we could turn into facts human behaviour. If 95 percent of men acted in a particular manner in the presence of a hot chic, we could conclude that men (generally) act in such manner in the presence of hot chics. Although we had to consider the margin of error and a significant level. I'm not going into STATS101, my focus would be the outrageous stats I've heard. Stats not backed with any form of research.

I grew up hearing outrageous stats including Ijebus were stingy and Hausas were lazy. Someone probably made these statements and people that were to lazy to conduct the research took it as a fact. The probably looked round and make such conclusion after they remembered their Ijebu neighbour did not remember to give her/him christmas gift.

These stats became more outrageous in arguements. I've heard statements like, do you know that over ninety percent of UBA staffs were Igbo. Maybe they were true, who knows, but what I do know was people cook such stats up just to win arguements/debates.

A guy earlier today was complaining about the traffic and said, "Do you know there are more cars in England than the whole of Nigeria and their traffic is not as bad as the ones we have in Nigeria?" How the hell did this guy know we had lesser number of cars in Nigeria and the traffic wasn't as bad? I'm sure the woman that concured with him in the bus would make that statement elsewhere.

The worse was when it came to sports especially football. You would wonder where they got their stats from. When I had time I would simple use my phone to browse and check out Opta Sport to dispute such facts. I remember a time a guy was talking about the greatness of Jay Jay Okocha as a footballer. He said Okocha was the highest Nigerian goal scorer. We found out from a football records site there were Nigerians that had scored more goals and he failed to score over 100 goals in all competitions. Maybe he did score a few in the local league before his fame but no records of those.

I would like you to share some outrageous stats you've heard in arguements. Those "do you know that over 80 percent of..."