You sometimes see a table claiming that African countries, including Ghana, have the lowest IQs in the world. The most widely shared version is on Business Insider Africa. Business Insider cites CEOWORLD magazine. CEOWORLD did not test anyone. Its figures match, to two decimal places, a 2019 dataset compiled by Richard Lynn and David Becker. Now look at what is inside that dataset. Sierra Leone's score of 45 rests on one study from 1966. Mali's rests on a single sample. South Sudan's comes from refugee children. Ghana's 58.16 appears to be the average of a small set of test samples and Ghana's TIMSS school assessment scores, rescaled and relabelled as IQ. An IQ below 70 is the usual threshold for intellectual disability. A national average of 58 would mean most Ghanaians could not hold a job, run a business or raise a family. Anyone who has spent a day in Accra knows that is absurd. The dataset's own author agrees there is a problem. Becker wrote in 2019 that differences between countries scoring below 60 are more likely measurement error than real differences in intelligence. He also wrote that the dataset is not suitable for comparing two individual countries. The dataset was never peer reviewed, which Becker himself calls a weak point. Yet researchers used it in published papers for years, because reviewers check the analysis, not the data underneath. In 2024, academics called for several of those papers to be retracted. That is how a zombie statistic is made. Lynn and Becker becomes "a study". The study becomes "CEOWORLD". CEOWORLD becomes "Business Insider". Each step adds a more respectable name and no new evidence. Then it turns up in social media arguments as settled fact. Before you share a ranking, ask three questions. Who collected the data? How many people were measured, and when? Does the number survive a basic sanity check?