1.5 million people at Nyayo Stadium? Absolutely no way!
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
26 June 2022
We are now officially
in the silly season of politics and so, we should expect to see and hear
many silly things; like this… One of the political parties held a formal
meeting (not a rally) at Nyayo stadium in Nairobi recently. An online
supporters group posted a video of the event and claimed that there were
1.5 million participants!
Now, a million is a
very large number. So large that many people cannot comprehend its
magnitude. I suspect they have become accustomed to the word million
because of the frequency with which it is mentioned; especially in
reference to money. Hence such mistaken exaggerations tend to happen
quite often.
I have written about
this matter of crowds in the past and demonstrated that it is impossible
to gather one million people for a meeting anywhere in Nairobi. In fact,
there has never been a gathering of one million people anywhere in the
world. Even the famous “One million Man March” did not reach that
number. Independent sources estimated it to be about 800 thousand.
The largest crowd in
Kenya was the Kibaki inauguration ceremony of 2002. I attended the event
and my estimate was about 64,000. I gave detailed calculations in this
column in 2007.
A closer look at the
video of the recent political meeting at Nyayo stadium, reveals that the
participants were all seated on plastic armchairs. These measure about
50cm wide [side to side] and 60cm long [back to front]. When arranged in
a meeting room, each is given some leg-room space, say 40cm, making the
total length occupied about one metre.
Therefore, each seat
occupies about half a square metre. Thus, 1.5million seats would require
750,000sq.m of ground area. This is equivalent to about 185 acres of
land! The entire land reserved for Nyayo stadium is about 25 acres. So,
obviously, 1.5 million seats cannot fit there!
The absolute maximum
number that can be fitted is 200,000. Now, this is not encouragement for
another political party to hold a meeting at this venue and claim
200,000 participants attended! The real practical limit of a crowd at
Nyayo stadium is around 50,000.
Some might argue that
the 1.5 million number included those that followed the event via live
stream on the internet. However, I checked the internet and, to this day
there are about 9,000 views of the video. This is a respectable number
but still a far-cry from 1.5 million.
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