The other day I saw a particularly silly photograph circulating on Facebook FB -2.28% that prominently featured a quote by Sergei Brin about how “Russia is Nigeria with Snow.” It features a (nakedly and almost cartoonishly racist) photo of an African wearing a Russian police uniform, and a bunch of data points which attempt to prove that the two countries are basically just two peas in a pod.

Some of the data points the photo features are truly bizarre such as the “rate of growth of gold reserves.” Others seems to be extremely out of date, such s Nigeria’s population (which is now 160+million, not 140). It’s actually quite ironic, when you think about it, that the creator of a graphic designed to show Russia’s backwardness and primitiveness couldn’t be bothered to use Google GOOG +1.93% to go and get accurate data, but it’s depressingly common among the Russian opposition which, for all of its laudable qualities, has an extremely loose relationship with objective reality.

So, in the interests of educating the public, using data from the CIA’s World Factbook I thought I would quickly throw together a few charts showing how Russia and Nigeria actually stack up. As you can see, they are extremely different countries at extremely different levels of development that have virtually nothing in common. Keep these graphs in mind the next time you hear someone pompously declare that “Russia is Nigeria with Snow” or, in the original formulation, “Russia is Burkino Faso with rockets.”

Read this piece in Forbes

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.