The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur is one of maybe two or three Ministers in President Dramani Mahama's entire cabinet that I respect and believe deserves to be a Minister and I was therefore really shocked to read the below speech she delivered at a consultative meeting with religious bodies. According to this speech by Nana Oye Lithur, there are thirty one million eight hundred thousand(31.8m) children in Ghana, can we believe that?

The last census in Ghana put our entire population between twenty four to twenty five million (24-25 million)people in Ghana so where did we get these extra children from, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Togo, Niger and Mali?

"More Than Six Million Ghanaian Children Engaged In Child Labour

09-May-2014

6.36 million children in Ghana are said to be engaged in economic activities which constitute child labour. This means one out of every five children is engaged in child labour.

The Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur announced this in Accra at a consultative meeting with religious bodies.She said figures reveal that the state of child protection in the country is not the best. She said despite a strong legal frame work, the inability to enforce the law and the lack of a clear cut policy in child protection are serious contributors to this growing trend."

Source: GBC

I know the Ndc zealots, apologists and foot soldiers might come here in droves defending this as just a mistake and I will agree with them but it is a mistake that should not have happened. We are not talking about a slip of tongue here but the Minister is using a supposed statistical numbers based on a study that had been done by her Ministry or one of the government agencies, more likely the Statistics Service.

"6.36 million children in Ghana are said to be engaged in economic activities which constitute child labour. This means one out of every five children is engaged in child labour."

When I was in class one in 1969,we used to have a Maths class called "MENTAL". Every morning for about thirty minutes where the Teacher will be holding a cain and raining the multiplication numbers at you and woe betide you if you don't get the answer right when the cain is pointed at you. It went like this:

TEACHER, 5X7, Kwaku Manuh

Kwaku Manuh, 35

TEACHER, 7X9, Bill Asamoah

Bill Asamoah, 63

TEACHER, 6X2, Kojo Nkansah, LilWayne

Kojo Nkansah, LilWayne, 8

SOUND FROM TEACHERS CANE on Kojo Nkansah's head, pow pow pow

I used to have a friend in class who was a stutterer and mathematically challenged and his stuttering always flares up when it was "MENTAL" time. The Teacher will shout, Andrew Oti(Not real name), 4x7 and he goes, ehh, ehh, ehh, ehh and the Teacher's whip will go to work, pow pow pow.

This is how it used to be that kept us on our toes to learn our multiplication tables and there was no computers then. It seems like our educational level has taken a tumble if a Minister after reading over her speech could not detect that if one out of five is six means the same as 5x6, then the country is in trouble.

NDC administrations are used to massaging numbers to suit its better Ghana agenda and Samuel Okudzeto's 1.6 million jobs created in the first ten months of Mills administration and the low inflation figures churned out when Ghanaians are living in hell.

I am wondering if the Minister just wrote the speech without the guidance of the statistical figures and was just massaging the figures to get more money for her Ministry. This is a Ministry with two deputies, Principal Secretary and this shouldn't have happened. We are not talking of a grammatical mistake which is forgivable but a Minister should not be giving wrong figures based on statistics.

Justice Sarpong

(CARDINAL of TRUTH)