The Ghana Numbers Problem – Elizabeth Ohene
The Guinness Book of Records has obviously not been paying attention to Ghana.
Last week I saw a funeral announcement in the newspapers for a woman said to have died at 130 years of age. Up until this announcement, the Guinness Book of Records had listed a Japanese man as the oldest ever living human being; and he had died aged 122. There is a Mexican woman who is claiming to be 127 and is still alive, but there seems to be some difficulty about the proper documentation of her birth records.
But to think that we have had in our midst all these years a woman who has broken all these records and nobody had ever heard about her.
In this country I have heard it said that we have a school age, a work/professional age, a football age, a vanity age and a real age. This probably explains why we have such a nonchalance attitude towards the registration of births and people feel free to pick a figure, any figure from the sky and claim that as their age.
To the uninitiated, a school age would be when you find yourself in a class where you are much older than the rest of the class and you take up a false age to be able to blend in with the rest of the class. A work/professional age would be when you try to get a job that has a recruitment cut off age that is way below your age and you trim your age to fit in. For example you have to be under 25 years to be enlisted in the police service.
A football age is in a category by itself because we have become notorious about giving false ages to our footballers and when foreign clubs sign them up, they now do so on the understanding they might have to add up to four years to the stated age on his birth certificate.
A vanity age is not a particularly Ghanaian phenomenon, but what women of a certain age try to do to get around being seen as old; thus she might remain at age 28 until she turns 40 and then stay at 41 until she turns 50 and wouldn’t admit to being a day older until she turns 80. A real age is what your age really is; the problem is in this country, many people don’t seem to know or prefer to deliberately falsify their age.
Some time ago I saw a notice in the Gazette of a man who was announcing a change in his date of birth. The notice said the man, who worked with the Fire Service had been born eight years later than what was on all his official documentation. In other words, if you attended the man’s 50th birthday party last year, then this year you would be attending his 43rd birthday because his life thus far had all been a dreadful mistake. An eight-year mistake.
I have been trying to work out at which point the mistake occurred. His birth was not registered at birth. But at which age was he sent to school? Or better still, what age was given on his enrolment at school? It is most unlikely that some teacher would have mistakenly added eight years to the age of the six year old that came to Primary one.
I know that in times past, people you sit in the same class with would not necessarily be your age and there could be a range in age of one to eight in a class, but surely that can no longer be the case. It is when retirement is approaching that lots of people used to suddenly discover fresh evidence to show they were younger than they had been at the start of their working lives. The Head of the Civil Service tried to stop this particular scam by issuing a directive that officials could no longer change their age, but it doesn’t seem to be working.
Earlier this year I saw an advertisement in the newspaper announcing a change in the date and place of birth of a woman.
It does look like we as a people have a problem with numbers when it comes to age. Let me amend that. We have a numbers problem, period. If it suits a particular situation, we don’t hesitate to say a child is ten when he is in fact six or twelve.
We stretch this to other spheres; we interchange millions and billions with sheer abandon as though one can be used in place of the other. It shows in everything we do and say. When President Mahama became President in 2012, he was going to fix everything that was wrong by 2013; then he was going to do everything by 2014 and now I have counted 15 major different things that he is going to do by 2015 or 2016.
The Finance Minister has presented a budget to Parliament; and all government expenditures for 2015 are assumed to have been listed in this budget. If you tally up all the promises that the President and his officials keep making and which are not listed in the budget, you would have no choice but to accept that we have no respect for figures.
If somebody has died at the age of 130 years, it means that person must have been born in the year 1884. Let me take that again; for somebody to be 130 years old this year, that person must have been born in 1884.
I have toyed with contacting the Guinness Book of Records to alert them to a record here that they have missed then I hesitated. We usually do not have a lot of respect for figures but when it comes to figures in obituary notices, I have learnt that you have to take them with a generous helping of salt.
A friend of mine died last year. She had two grandchildren. When her obituary notice appeared in the newspapers, it said she had 18 grandchildren. Her family had decided two grandchildren did not befit the venerable old lady and so the figure 18 was manufactured. You take figures, official or otherwise in this country seriously at your own risk.
Coutesy http://graphic.com.gh/features/opinion/35599-the-ghana-numbers-problem.html
Elizabeth Ohene Columist Daily Graphic
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