Rise five times versus rise five-fold

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

21 November 2021

A recent headline in the Business Daily proclaimed: “Safaricom debt rises five times to Sh76bn”. The story was that the company’s debts had increased to Sh76.9 billion compared to Sh14.7B at the beginning of the year.

Now 76.9 is slightly more than five times 14.7, but, was the heading accurate. I am not concerned with the arithmetic accuracy but with the expression “rises five times”. Does it mean that the current value is five times the previous one? No, it doesn’t!

The phrase “rises five times” actually refers to the number of increments in debt that brought the total borrowing to Sh76.9B. Perhaps something like: the first increment raised debt to, say, Sh50B, the second time to Sh60B, then to Sh65B, then to Sh70B and finally to Sh76B.

This is the meaning of “rises five times”. But that’s not what happened. The report says the debt jumped from Sh14.7B to Sh76.9B. The correct expression for such a change is “five-fold”. Thus, a more accurate headline should be “Safaricom debt rises five-fold to Sh76bn”.

Still, there is one more accuracy problem with the headline: it says “to Sh76B”, yet the story talks about Sh76.9B. When 76.9 is rounded to the nearest whole number, we get 77; thus, this heading should have read: “Safaricom debt rises five-fold to Sh77bn”.

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How long does one generation of humans last? A few weeks ago, my cousins and I were building our family tree and we wondered which years our earliest known forefather lived. This person is my grandfather’s great-great grandfather.

I suggested we work it out this way: We have a rough idea of when our grandfather was born – between 1890 and 1895. From that time to today, it is about 120 to 125 years. We all have children who are the fourth generation from our grandfather.

From this information, we conclude that a generation lasts an average of 30 years. Now, our grandfather was the fifth generation from our earliest forefather. This is a period of approximately 150 years.

That took us to 1745 as his year of birth. But we were cognisant of the fact that, those days, life expectancies were significantly lower than the last 100 years. Therefore, we agreed that he was born some time between 1745 and 1790.

In case you are wondering: I am Mungai son of Kihanya, sone of Ngonjo, son of Karagu, son of Gacheru, son of Gitubia sone of Muya. Now you know me fully.