Questions have been raised about statistics presented by Statistician General Anna Majelantle on Thursday painting a rosy picture about the decline in the proportion of people living below poverty datum line from 30.6 percent in 2002/3 to 19.3 in 2009/10 and 16.3 percent in 2015/16 in Botswana. Similarly preliminary results of the 2015/16 Botswana Multi-Topic Household Survey (BMTHS): Poverty Module show that the proportion of people living below one dollar a day (currently $1.90) has also been declining from 23.4 percent in 2002/3, to 6.4 in 2009/10 and 5.8 percent in 2015/16. Of particular interest in the preliminary results is that while the proportion of persons below a dollar a day decreased at national level, the actual number of persons living below a dollar a day increased from 119, 144 to 119, 383. A similar trend is observed in urban villages where the proportion drops from 6.0 to 5.1 percent while the actual number of people below a dollar a day increases from 40, 602 to 46, 356. This trend is reversed in rural areas where an increase in the proportion from 8.4 percent to 8.8 percent goes against a decline in the actual number of person living below a…