By Kamuti Muyambela
Former Republican vice-president Dr Guy Scott’s wife, Dr Charlotte says the inflation graph is misleading.
Dr Charlotte highlighted this in a recent tweet, where she observed that the graph by the Central Statistical Office of Zambia projecting the reduction in the annual inflation rate to 10 percent was misleading as it started at 10 instead of 0.
“The vertical axis on this graph is very misleading! Why start at 10%? Looks like there’s no inflation left,” Dr Charlotte argued in a tweet.
But someone going by the name Siuluta argued that in this particular case there was no misleading as a full scale would still have shown a halving of inflation in just 10 months, which he said was no mean feat, and that this way of highlighting financial statistics was pretty standard and therefore he would not jump on the “misleading” bandwagon “if I was you.”
“Halving is correct and the graph should (have) shown that. But the choice of the axis means that the impression is that inflation has decreased by 99%. A graph should communicate the same message as the narrative,” Dr Charlotte retorted.
But Haggai Sainetti warned her that “Presider singers will come for you. They don’t like to be critiqued.”
“That is the type of praised singer that losses elections,” responded Dr Charlotte.
