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The NY Times service is carrying an article, In Africa, figures aren't precise, they're political, by Norimitsu Onishi that bears notice:

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - There is never a shortage of statistics about Africa: millions of dead from the war in Congo, hundreds of thousands of refugees, a third of the population HIV-positive in west Africa.

But in sub-Saharan Africa, despite apparent precision and willing acceptance by media, aid agencies and the public, one of the hardest things to find is a reliable number.

Lack of money and expertise, the collapse of roads and railways that has cut off huge swaths of the continent, all make compiling solid statistics nearly impossible.

In many countries, very little is known, statistically speaking, outside the capitals. The latest statistics, or the only ones, are sometimes decades old, from colonial days.

That's because there's been very little civilization since the colonial days.

Consider Nigeria. Everyone agrees it is Africa's most populous nation. But what is its population? The United Nations says 114 million; the U.S. State Department, 120 million. The World Bank says 126.9 million, while the CIA puts it at 126,635,626. The Nigerian government's last estimate, a decade ago, was 105 million. The population of Texas - less than the difference between these last two estimates - may or may not be living in Nigeria.

Because of the scarcity of numbers here, those that do exist tend to be more politicized and less scrutinized than they are elsewhere.

That the figures for refugees in a particular war, or victims from a certain illness, are vastly inflated is an open secret. So what, humanitarian officials argue, privately. With Africa stuck on the world's back burner, it is difficult to draw attention without generous statistics. The cause is good.

But making up numbers leads to all kinds of bogosity:

In Africa, in the absence of any figures at all, imaginary ones take on a life of their own - as they did last year with the charges that child workers were forced to work in Ivory Coast's cocoa plantations.

Many accounts in the British and U.S. news media last year spoke breathlessly of 15,000 child slaves on Ivory Coast's cocoa plantations, producing the chocolate you eat.

The number first appeared in Malian newspapers, citing the UNICEF office in Mali. But UNICEF's Mali office had never researched the issue of forced child laborers in Ivory Coast. The UNICEF office in Ivory Coast, which had, concluded that it was impossible to determine the number.

Still, repeated often enough, the number was gladly accepted by some private organizations, globalization opponents seeking a fight with Nestlé and Hershey, and some journalists.

Some reports incorrectly cited the State Department's annual human-rights report on Ivory Coast as the source of the 15,000 figure. In fact, the State Department report for 2000 said simply that "according to a UNICEF study, approximately 15,000 Malian children were trafficked and sold into indentured servitude on Ivorian plantations in 1999."

The report for 2001 said that "the number is difficult to estimate" because no "thorough survey has been conducted."

This month, the results of the first extensive survey of child labor in cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast and three other African nations were released by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, a nonprofit, multinational research organization that works in Africa.

The survey, financed by the Agency for International Development and the U.S. Labor Department, found that almost all children working in cocoa fields were children of the plantation owners, not forced laborers.

As for child workers unrelated to plantation owners, the study found that brokers had placed 2,100 foreign children, most of them ages 15 to 17, in Ivory Coast's cocoa plantations. Ninety-four percent of the children, the study says, knew the intermediary, or broker who hired them for the plantation work.

"The most frequent reason given for agreeing to leave with the intermediary was the promise of a better life," the report says. It adds: "None reported being forced against their will to leave their home abode. One hundred percent indicated that they had been informed in advance that they were going to work on cocoa farms."

Jim Gockowski, a U.S. agricultural economist who led the study for the Institute of Tropical Agriculture, said, "By and large, the cocoa industry didn't deserve the rap it got."

But politics is sometimes more influential than precision when it comes to numbers in Africa. Since they were released early this month, the institute's findings have received little attention - perhaps only 1 percent of what the 15,000 figure received.

Attention! Anything that spoils the fundraising won't get any.