Don’t joke with a million; it is bigger than you imagine!
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
03 July 2022
The reactions I got
from last weeks column about fitting 1.5 million people at the Nyayo
Stadium grounds tell me that very many people cannot fathom how large
one million is. It is easy to write it out: 1,000,000, but it is
different story when trying to visualise it.
One person asked me
what if half of the crowd was standing and the rest seated. Well: if 1.5
million chairs need 185 acres of land, it follows that 750,000 will
occupy 77.5 acres. The Nyayo Stadium has just 25 acres; so, they can’t
fit. Even if all were standing, they still wouldn’t fit!
One million is a
huge number. Let us see how large it is by looking at the scenario in a
different way. Suppose the 1.5 million people are asked to form a queue
as the enter the venue. How long would it be?
The depth (from
chest to the back) of a person is about 20cm to 30cm and, when standing
in a queue, people tend to leave about 20cm to 30cm gaps of “personal
space”. So, each person occupies about 50cm (half a metre) of ground
along the queue.
Therefore, 1.5
million people would make a queue that is about 750,000 metres long.
Now, 1,000m make one kilometre, so, 750,000m is equal to 750km! That is:
they would line up all the way from Nyayo Stadium gate to the
Kenya-Ethiopia boarder crossing point in Moyale. In other words, it
wouldn’t be humanly possible to make such a queue – who would walk to
Moyale?
Now this was not a
political rally but a consultative meeting with representatives from
selected interest groups. So, the participants probably went through
some form of registration. Suppose there were 10 desks to register the
participants and it took, say, one minute for each. How long would it
take to enroll all the 1.5 million people?
This works out to 10
people per minute; that is, 150,000 minutes in total, or 2,500 hours, or
104 days. This is more than three months of continuous registration 24
hour per day. In other words, the first person must have entered the
venue some time in the month of March and has been sitting there waiting
for the rest of the crowd to get settled before the meeting begins!
The moral of this
story is that one million is a very large number. People must stop
joking with it!
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