Once the happiest, Nigeria has joined the world’s gloomiest nations
As a columnist commenting on Nigerian issues, but writing from abroad, it’s imperative that I am in touch with the reality in the country; nothing can be worse than a pundit who is out of touch with reality. So, to keep abreast of developments in Nigeria, I spend an hour or so every evening reading Nigerian newspapers online. Some newspapers, such as Vanguard, ThisDay and Tribune, make this easier by putting their electronic edition, or e-paper, on the web. I also receive the electronic edition of this excellent newspaper, BusinessDay! I mention the e-paper because reading it is like reading a newspaper’s print edition. Unlike the online editions, in which you have to navigate and connect isolated stories, the e-paper gives you the whole picture, the full panoply of the news and analyses in a newspaper in one fell swoop. But the online editions have the advantage of contemporaneity, as they are regularly updated. So, with the e-papers and the online editions, I am mostly in the loop about what goes on in Nigeria.
Now, here is the point. Ever since I have been reading Nigeria’s newspapers, I have never seen a more sustained period of gloomy coverage or reporting than the past four to six months. It has been a daily avalanche of negative news about the economy and living standards in Nigeria. Recently, BusinessDay began to run what it calls “The Face of Recession Series”, which highlights how the recession is hurting different sectors of the economy and “impacting on people, society and businesses”. Several other newspapers are publishing their own grim recession stories. One newspaper published a table on its front page, showing the soaring prices of consumer goods. Another had a scary cover story, titled, “Economic woes worsen, over one million lose jobs within three months”. Nigeria’s Pentecostal Bishops told President Buhari, according to Vanguard, “There is hunger in the land”. The irrepressible Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie had earlier written an open letter to the president on the same issue – hunger in Nigeria!
But as I read these gloomy reports, I couldn’t help wondering whether Nigerians are still happy people. After all, we have a reputation for always “shuffering and shmiling”, as Fela sang. Indeed, twice, Nigeria topped world league tables as the happiest nation. Remember 2003? The New Scientist magazine in the UK, in a survey of 65 countries, named Nigeria the happiest country in the world. Seven years later, in 2010, Gallop World Poll, in a survey of 53 countries, also ranked Nigeria as the happiest place on earth.
The measurement of subjective wellbeing has, of course, become a global phenomenon. Indeed, in July 2011, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling on countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use this to help guide their public policies. The UN later declared 20th March the International Day of Happiness, and happiness issues are at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Of course, the UN and those countries that measure happiness as a guide to public policy are simply following in the footsteps of Aristotle and other great philosophers, such as Jeremy Bentham, who regarded happiness as the end goal of human society. For Aristotle, happiness is “the supreme good”, while Bentham called for laws and policies that promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. But, as the famous economist Jeffrey Sachs has argued, theories of happiness point to different routes to achieving “good life”, ranging from the economists’ preference for personal income and consumption and the libertarians’ preference for personal liberty to the communitarians’ emphasis on social capital and the Calvinists’ call for respectable work. Sachs argues, however, that no single viewpoint has the answer and, therefore, there is need for a holistic approach.
Indeed, it is this holistic approach that has been adopted in the World Happiness surveys, whose findings are produced in the World Happiness Report, published under the auspices of the UN. The report, first published in 2012 and now in its 4th edition, was written by renowned professors John Helliwell of British Columbia University, Jeffrey Sachs (Columbia University) and Richard Layard (London School of Economics). My interest in the surveys stems from an intellectual curiosity about happiness. But I also have a practical interest, having participated in a couple of surveys on the UK National Wellbeing Programme. Furthermore, from a Nigerian perspective, I am interested in what makes Nigerians happy or what influences their subjective wellbeing.
Last year, in a piece titled “Measuring social progress: Nigeria in world happiness rankings” (BusinessDay, May 11, 2015), I wrote about the 2015 World Happiness Report, in which Nigeria was ranked 78th out of 158 countries. Six variables contributed to explaining each country’s position on the table. These were: GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble), trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption), perceived freedom to make life decisions, and generosity (as measured by charitable donations). According to the survey, the two significant contributors to Nigeria’s position in the 2015 World Happiness Index were social support (about 40.5%) and GDP per capita (about 27%), followed by freedom to make life choices (13.5%) and generosity (10.8%), and then by healthy life expectancy (5.4%) and perception of absence of corruption (2.7%).
As I noted in the article, Nigeria’s middle-ranking position on the Index (78th out of 158) was impressive, considering that the country usually languishes at the bottom of world league tables. However, I also pointed out that, while personal income was important, social support from relatives and friends played too high a role in explaining the subjective wellbeing of Nigerians. Why did Nigerians derive virtually no happiness from good governance and the absence of corruption? Why did they derive little happiness from healthy life expectancy? And why did they feel they had no great personal freedom to make choices? These are life issues that make people happy, but, according to the report, they added very little to the wellbeing of Nigerians.
The 2016 World Happiness Report was published in March this year. So, what does it tell us about the happiness of Nigerians? Are they happier? Well, sadly, Nigeria has fallen from 78th out of 158 in 2015 to 103th out 157 this year! Forget about Nigeria being the happiest nation on earth. What the 2016 report shows is that Nigeria is, in fact, no longer among the averagely happy nations in the world, as it was on the 2015 Index, with its middle-ranking position. Now, ranked 103th out 157 countries, Nigeria, as evidenced by the responses of Nigerians to the life evaluation questions, has joined the ranks of the world’s gloomiest nations. These findings are consistent with the ones published last week by the Nigerian polling agency, NOI Polls, which showed that Nigerians’ Personal Wellbeing Index (PWBI) dropped by 0.6 points in the second quarter of 2016.
What is also interesting about the 2016 World Happiness Index is how the six life evaluation variables now contribute to perceptions of happiness among Nigerians. Social support is no longer the dominant contributor to Nigeria’s position on the happiness index. In other words, when asked “If you were in trouble, do you have relatives or friends you can count on to help you whenever you need them?”, fewer Nigerians (about 30%) answered “Yes” than did for the 2015 report (about 40.5%). This, of course, means that personal incomes have to play a greater role in explaining the happiness of Nigerians. But, with the debilitating economic recession, most Nigerians derive virtually no happiness from their personal economic situation. Furthermore, despite President Buhari’s war on corruption, perception of absence of corruption contributed, according to the survey, less than 4 per cent to the subjective wellbeing of Nigerians.
Surely, as I argued when discussing Nigeria’s position in the 2015 World Happiness Index, Nigeria is not generating enough economic prosperity or investing enough in social capital to engender the happiness of its people. What’s more, Nigeria has not implemented the UN Resolution asking countries to measure the happiness and wellbeing of their people and use this to guide their public policies. Yet, unless the government starts measuring and addressing happiness and wellbeing issues, Nigeria, once the world’s happiest nation, risks becoming one of the saddest and least content!
Olu Fasan