Speaker acknowldeges “numbers can be boring,” then proves it

“Fellow citizens, I know numbers can be boring,” Ghana presidential candidate Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo-Addo acknowledged in a speech last month at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “but these are important numbers.”

Then he delivered three paragraphs like this one:

“The additional cost of providing Free Senior High School will be around 1% of Ghana’s GDP. The cost of providing free secondary school education, which includes tuition, boarding, feeding and all the other charges for the 2013-2014 academic year, is estimated at 0.1% of our GDP. This translates into some GH¢78 million. We have made provision for a major increase in enrollment as a result of admitting all JHS students into SHS in 2014-2015. We expect the cost to rise to GH¢288 million (0.3% of GDP) in that academic year and increase to GH¢774 million in 2015-2016 (0.7% of GDP).”

He’s wrong about numbers. They aren’t boring but important. They’re important but boring. —DM