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The weekend before last, the world was shocked by the announcement that Nigeria (we hail thee) is the happiest country in the world. To those of us who know naija like the back of our hands comes whispered questions. How manage? Are any of the members of the body that carried out the survey by any means Nigerian? Did some palms get greased so that we can clinch that enviable title? After all, we have been pulling some impossible stunts lately ever since they made that woman from the World Bank a minister for finance. We are settling our debts, “fighting corruption” and even trying to jump into bed with China after they killed our young men in the Ikorodu fire disaster and impregnated all our young girls in Agila where they were building a “cement factory and a railway line” for the thousandth time.
Of course we were not the only ones filled with awe. Our oyibo brothers and sisters did not find the results of that survey very funny. How could some monkeys from the backwoods called Africa dare to be happier than the world’s most developed most powerful nations? How can we with our corrupt governments, our armed robbers, our corrupt policemen, our NEPA, our unemployment, our AIDS status and even our power-hungry third termers be happier than their efficient governments, their ever vigilant and no-nonsense 911,their clean streets, their fine cars, their skinny and half-starved anorexic chicks. What right do we have to be happier than they and their nuclear bombs and war machines? I spent the better part of Sunday afternoon listening to the phone-in BBC programme “Have Your Say” and I heard one caller after another try to expound his or her idea of what makes a happy people (I’d like to doff my hat to a certain Ngozi who called in from Lagos to give the best reason –in perfect English- why Nigerians are very happy people. Her basic explanation dwelt on Nigerians as very hopeful and optimistic people.) Most of the callers from the Western world tried to point out that happiness was immeasurable and hence tried to fault the results of the survey. Yeah right! I wonder if happiness would have been measurable if the country that topped the list was European or American but again Nigerians are used to bad belle mentality and so it doesn’t dim our happy light.
It is poignant to note that the lessons from this survey should never be lost on the world and her citizens. The free world carries about the motto of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but the meaning has been lost as everyone races to accumulate more wealth, more power, more bombs, more book knowledge. Little time is given to the very things that actually matters. An intercourse with the wealthy will reveal that their focus 100% of the time is on gathering more and the fear that any pause in the foraging for more wealth will result in the loss of the one already gathered. Consequently a life of liberty and pursuit of happiness is replaced by that of worry and the fear that the sky will collapse on our heads tomorrow. For some, it actually happens and they lose their wealth and nothing can be done to redeem the situation or they lose their lives and their worldly gatherings are given to people who never worked for it or ever spent a sleepless night worrying about how to keep growing it.
The greatest puzzlement to the wealthy countries of the world would be how a country as poor as Nigeria can be declared the happiest in the world. Well, the simplest explanation can be found by going to the most basic unit of our existence: family. Nigerians still draw on their family values to help them through thick and thin. The family has always been recognized as the bastion from which an individual can draw strength, comfort, joy, happiness and security. Is it the unemployed graduate wondering from office to office looking for a job in the big city? He has his family to fall back on at the end of the day and they will give him hope, put the smile on his jobless face and inspire him to go out there and face the world tomorrow. Is it the AIDS patient dying in hospital? He looks about himself and sees family and friends who have come not to say goodbye but to hope for one final miracle that will reverse the situation and increase the blood cell count. How about the farmer who has had a poor harvest or a student who failed his exams or a teenage daughter that got put in the family way? Living in the United States among a people so different in thought and action has yet been one of my greatest adventures in life and in my loneliest moments, I have had to draw on the strength of family and friends from six time zones away. The African family network is so extensive and goes beyond a man, his wife and his children as the western family is patterned. When Hilary Clinton said that “it takes a village to raise a child” she had little or no idea what it meant and neither does the American society. A true understanding of these words will not lead anyone to wonder why Nigerians are the happiest people in the world.
The western world has a distorted image of what family life is. Case in Point: in this United States, the television is the father, 911 is the mother, McDonalds is the kitchen and sex predators on the internet are our kids’ best friends. Our jobs are our husbands and wives and the home is just a building with a television in each room and a bed for us to sleep at night. In the morning we get in our cars and go to work, our kids to school where they get a lot of book knowledge and nothing about humanity (we don’t do God talk in our schools.) The family life is so devoid of the influence of the extended family that any problem that goes beyond the wife and the husband is effectively dealt with in the divorce court and “all man find his level.” The kids are not prepared on how to deal with conflicts and once they grow and leave the home, they are pretty much fair game for all sorts of evil that lurks out there waiting for them. In a storm the have no one and nowhere to run.
In conclusion, we need to return to the age old saying: “money cannot buy happiness.” Nigerians have a long way to go: an overambitious president to push out, a corrupt police force to rehabilitate, a weak health sector to strengthen, unemployment issues to tackle, NEPA to reform and perhaps an atomic bomb to build someday. However, while we wait for these changes to occur, we shall roll out our drums in glorious owambe and gbedu “jejely” to this good thing that has come out of Nazareth.
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