Some are quibbling over the numbers of the APC presidential primary. They say the 10.9 million votes are fiction. They are overwhelmed with the numbers because of a few videos of overcounting.
We should lament overcounts. But if, for the sake of argument, we say there were some overzealous party faithful, we may say let us deduct a million or two. What is left is still intimidating. We must give the party some flowers for doing everything in the open. If they deny the numbers, can they deny the teeming crowds that we saw live across the country?
They teemed in Kaduna, Kano, Borno, Lagos, et al. What is happening is a certain kind of tendentious illiteracy. It is called innumeracy. The ignorance about how to interpret numbers. Worse still, we point out a neurosis of numbers called dyscalculia, which refers to complete lack of mental acuity in looking at numbers. If you take a million or two from the numbers, and it is 9.9 million or 8.9 million, is that not sheer brilliance of organisation and mobilisation? Again, can they even comment on the mammoth showing? The evidence of their eyes.
This essayist did not see any quibbling over Obi’s 45 million voters without a queue. In ADC, we didn’t see the crowd that even gave Atiku his mere million votes. No one counted. It is the hypocrisy of numbers. The English language has no word for that. But it can fit into dyscalculia, or ‘hypo-numbers.’ Some of us love fiction more than facts. Pulp fiction, that is.
