There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. And Jack Warner wants to get rid of the statistics.

According to the country's recently appointed National Security Minister, murders are caused by figures. And he isn't talking about Faye-Ann Lyons in tights. No, it's the damned media, which is in league with the PNM to use statistics to make killers kill.

"People are being encouraged when they see no crime in an area," explained Warner. "They want to make news, they want to make headlines that spoil the record, and they get an incentive to do this."

Of course, since the murder rate in Laventille was even higher when the PNM was in government, this begs the question as to who was paying killers back then to kill.

Mr Warner is well aware that statistics undermine national security. His predecessor, John Sandy, told Parliament in March that, of the 8,178 persons arrested during last year's State of Emergency, only 13 percent were convicted. Just three months later, Sandy was removed as National Security Minister and Warner appointed to the post. Why did Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar choose him? As the novelist HG Wells, who died in 1946, wrote, "Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write": and ours is a citizenry which considers winning the Lotto statistically probable and heart disease not.

So Kamla was probably impressed how, when Warner last year told Caribbean football officials, "If there is anybody here who has a conscience and wishes to send back the money I am willing to take the money and give it back to him at any moment", he didn't total the US$40,000 figure from Mohammed bin Hammam. Also, when Jack resigned from FIFA rather than prove his innocence with respect to bribery charges, the only number he had used to defend himself was Number Two which, coincidentally, is the same number Kamla used in her explanation about the Section 34 imbroglio. And she must have become even more enamoured of Warner's abilities when the Court of Arbitration for Sport in July described Warner as "prone to an economy with the truth", since only people familiar with Bayes Theorem would be able to measure how prone that is.

This theorem, which describes the effect of experience on opinion, says that P (A\B) = P (B\A) x P (A)/ {P (B\A) x P (A)} + {P (B|~A) x P (~A)} where P is the probability that Jack lies (B) when he talks (A). If we assign a probability of 50 per cent to A and 66 per cent to B, that gives us a 67 per cent probability that, when Jack speaks, he lies. Which would explain why he doesn't like statistics.

But Acting Police Commissioner Stephen Williams seems to have stymied Warner's plan by announcing that the National Security Minister has no authority to ban statistics. On the other hand, the Police Service did that themselves long before Warner brought it up, having removed crime figures from its website last June right after I wrote an article in the Sunday Express using their own statistics to show that serious crimes were increasing.

Thus, Warner felt no need to empirically prove his claim that the killing of 28-year-old Stephen Morris in Laventille last Tuesday "could have been avoided if the PNM was not sponsoring crime...it is a PNM murder." But the PNM could not carry out its nefarious plan to undermine the People's Partnership without the help of the media which, by publishing reports about who got killed, causes envy among other killers who, after applying a differential equation to calculate the murder rate, then go out and shoot somebody in the head. So, according to Warner, if the media doesn't have the stats to back up their news reports, then killers won't be tempted to kill.

Mr Warner gets support in his demonising of the media from non-PNM-biased commentators. So Peter O' Connor in last Sunday's Newsday argued that the media should publish photographs of the residence of female reporters, if their residence belongs to a PNM politician. And the National Security Minister's statement about how the media causes more killing was echoed by a mid-morning talkshow host on 102 FM, whose view was presumably based on psychological studies of media effects and not on her getting a board appointment when the People's Partnership came into office. But these two commentators, even with the help of all the National Award-getting journalists, cannot make the media understand their sacred responsibility to make Jack Warner look good.

So perhaps, in order to improve governance, other figures should also be banned, like 17 (the number of persons who were plotting to assassinate Kamla); six (the percentage of persons who use premium gas in Kamla's country); and, of course, 34: which is the number that sums up corruption, cronyism, and contempt for the country.

Email: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com