By Peluola Adewale
I presume that it is not every Obi supporter friend of mine who is obediently uncritical. I understand they may not express publicly any reservation they may have apparently not to appear demarket their candidate. In any case, it’s not wise to wash ones dirty linen in the public
But I think they need a family meeting with him. He has to change his style of public communication. He needs to cut off the unenforced error that usually rears ugly head whenever he tries to impress his listeners or spice his speech with statistics or data.
If he needs to quote figures he may jot them down and consult his note whenever the need arise, even professors do that. Yet, he has to have fidelity with hard facts.
In some cases, the data he gives are superfluous to the point he is making. Here is an example.
At a conference with supporters on August 11 in Abuja, he was making reference to Borno and the vast arable land in the North and the importance to his plan on exports. He did not need to attempt to impress by quoting the landmass of Borno. It is already an established fact that the North is a treasured hub for food crop agriculture in Nigeria. From the video It was clear he struggled to recollect the figure and thereafter came with a gaffe.
He apparently wanted to remember 789 square kilometres, but said “seventy point nine thousands square kilometres” (70.9000) .
Unfortunately, he did not only get the figure wrong but also there is nothing like “point nine thousands”. Neither there is “point ninety” nor “point nine hundred”. It is simply “seventy point nine” (70.9). All those zeros after “nine”are useless.
This is for a general education for those who don’t know. You don’t pronounce digits after decimal point as a whole number but individually . For instance, 70. 864 is “seventy point eight six four”, not “seventy point eight hundred sixty four”.
Again, Obi had given a wrong data for Nigerian exports in 2021 at a previous outing. He claimed that the value of Nigerian exports in 2021 was less than $30 billion. When this was fact checked it was discovered that he was wrong. It was over $50 billion.
Instead of letting it slide and move on, he chose the event at International Conference Centre to stick to his guns, and gleefully challenged the audience to “go and verify”.
He boldly claimed that the fact checkers who consulted data from international organizations which track foreign trades were wrong and he was right.
What is his argument? He got the figure, N18.9 trillion, from a report of the National Bureau of Statistics and that as at the day he made the statement the exchange rate of naira to one dollar was 650. Then he said “go and divide 650 with 18.9 you would get 29 point something billion dollars”. But it would give 34. 4, not 29 point something. However, it was a slip of the tongue. He actually wanted to say “divide 18.9 trillion by 650”. Truly, this gives $29.2 billion which justifies the claim of total exports being less than $30 billion by Obi.
Nonetheless, he was still wrong because of the wrong method he used to arrive at the figure. These are on two counts. First, foreign trade is originally denominated in dollar. The figure of N18.9 trillion given by the NBS was the naira equivalent of a figure originally obtained in dollar. So, if you wanted to get back the dollar value from the naira equivalent you would use the official rate since your source is a government agency. But Obi chose to use the black market rate. Secondly, if you wanted to do the conversion you would use the prevailing exchange rate when the data occurred. N18.9 trillion was the figure of Nigerian exports in 2021. To convert it back to dollar, you use the average naira to dollar exchange rate of the year or that of the December 2021. But Obi, by his own admission, used the black market rate of July 2022 for an official data collected in December 2021 despite the depreciation of naira. So if he wanted to use the parallel market rate, albeit wrong, it is 565 which obtained in December 2021, not 650 of July 2022.
Though Obi is not fundamentally different from Tinubu and Atiku in terms of economic policies and also a part of the last 23 years of failure, he has helped make the contest interesting and enthralling. The slate from the ruinous ruling elite of only Tinubu and Atiku would have been depressing without him.
