How sh10 million per day can be larger than sh70 million per week

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

21 January 2007

David Beckham, the English football star, is moving to an America club in a deal where he will earn about 250 million dollars in the next five years. Now, when the move was announced, the American media were quick to note that this works to about one million dollars per week.

The arithmetic was easy: A year has 52 weeks; therefore five years are 260 weeks; the footballer will earn $250 million; this works to almost one million dollars per week. The reason for going through such a calculation was to put the figure in perspective. $250 million just sounds like too much money – an amount that the average person cannot conceptualise. However, it suddenly hits you between the eyes when it is translated to one million dollars per week.

Unfortunately, when the news was reported in Kenya, all the media picked the one million dollar figure and converted it to shillings. The result was Sh70 million per week. Now, Sh70 million is just another large sum of money; it doesn’t have the same striking effect like one million dollars – even though the two are financially equal!

But, by recognising that a week has seven days, it turns out that Beckham’s salary is actually Sh10 million per day. Now suddenly, the magnitude of the earnings comes into perspective. In a way, this figure “sounds” bigger than Sh70 million per week.

A calculator fanatic may want to continue farther and work out the amount per hour or, even, per second. But that would be a worthless exercise – it would not add much value to the meaning of the number.

****

Bishop Margaret Wanjiru scoffed at the announcement by Mr James Kamangu that he had paid Sh3,000 as bride-price for her hand in marriage in 1978. She wondered aloud, “Do I look like a woman worth Sh3,000?”

Now 1978 is 29 years ago and we might want to know how much Sh3,000 from that year would be worth today. A quick way would be to find out what it would have bought at that time. The Sunday Nation was sold at Sh1.50 from July 1978 to the end of the year.

Thus with Sh3,000, one would have bought 2,000 copies of the paper in 1978. Today, the price is Sh40 and 2,000 newspapers will cost Sh80,000. Thus we can say that Sh3,000 from 1978 is equivalent to Sh80,000 today.

So this is the question to ask: Is Sh80,000 a fair bride price for a girl who has just finished school (without college education)? Well, only clan elders can answer that.