- Nigeria must do much more to make its citizens happier people
THE recent ranking of Nigeria as the sixth unhappiest nation on earth is a sobering reminder of the many challenges and shortcomings which define it as a nation, and must serve as a wake-up call to ensure that more is done to change the situation.
The country’s melancholy measurement of misery comes from Hanke’s Annual Misery Index 2018: The World’s Saddest (And Happiest) Countries, a ranking system developed by Professor Steve Hanke, an economist based in Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in the United States.
The Misery Index assesses the happiness or otherwise of nations based on the sum of unemployment, inflation and bank lending rates, while subtracting percentage changes in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita. The higher these indices are, the more miserable citizens of the country in question are likely to be.
Thailand and Hungary were ranked the least-miserable nations in the world in 2018 due to a happy marriage of popular, albeit authoritarian, governments and strong economic performances. Thailand enjoyed an inflation rate of 0.66 per cent and an unemployment rate of 1.04 per cent, while Hungary had inflation and unemployment rates of 2.18 per cent and 3.60 per cent, respectively.
Venezuela and Argentina were the most miserable countries in 2018, according to the Misery Index. The former’s spectacularly simultaneous social, political and economic meltdown is well-known, while Argentina’s entanglement in yet another currency crisis has had devastatingly depressing consequences for overall national wellbeing.
Nigeria’s sixth-place ranking is apparently justified, given a relatively indifferent economic performance in 2018. The country’s inflation rate hit 11.26 per cent in October 2018; unemployment stood at 23.10 per cent in the third quarter of last year, with youth unemployment attaining an all-time high of 38 per cent in the second quarter of 2018.
Moving away from the strictly economic confines of the Misery Index, it is obvious that the country is beset by a potent combination of incompetent leadership, widespread corruption, decrepit infrastructure, a huge upsurge in communal unrest and violent crime, as well as increasing despondency on the prospects of a better tomorrow.
Indeed, it is this growing pessimism in a citizenry formerly famous for its resilient optimism that is the real measure of the Nigerian nightmare. A people who were ranked the happiest people on earth in a 53-nation Gallup poll in 2011 and the World Values Survey in 2014 has become more miserable than at any other period in its history.
Thanks to the ubiquity of social media, the country’s many shortcomings are widely disseminated across the nation and the world, often being accompanied by harsh commentary of the most virulent kind. Almost every negative situation is quickly parlayed into ethnicity, religion and partisan politics, as a host of interested individuals set about portraying the country’s problems in the worst possible light.
If Nigeria is to return to the inherent happiness that was once a defining characteristic of its national ethos, it will have to tackle the economic and political difficulties that have combined to make misery so prominent in national life.
Governments at the federal, state and local government levels must focus more comprehensively on the social intervention programmes that help to alleviate the grinding poverty which is the foundation of communal despair. School feeding, free healthcare and education programmes, the disbursement of grants and soft loans, and similar measures must be expanded and built upon.
Much more attention must be paid to ensuring that all Nigerians are safe, secure and able to live satisfactory lives regardless of where they live. The war on corruption must be pursued with greater intelligence and objectivity. Increasingly deliberate efforts must be made to emphasize the many ties that bind the citizens, as opposed to the few things that ostensibly divide them.
