Is Nigeria happiest or saddest country?

   BY MINABERE IBELEMA 

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.

Earlier this month, Forbes magazine carried an article about the world’s happiest and saddest countries, and Nigeria made the saddest list at No. 20. In other words, only 19 other largely African countries are sadder. That, of course, has set off a blizzard of commentaries twirling around.

But how soon we forget! It wasn’t that long ago that the wind of happiness was said to be blowing decidedly in Nigeria’s favour. Remember a few years ago when another study determined that Nigerians were the happiest people in the world?

In fact, there is a myriad of measures of global happiness out there and, like multiple weather fronts, the results are engendering considerable turbulence. About the time the Forbes article was published, several other surveys produced findings that collide head-on with it.

Most notable among these are polls by Gallup and researchers at the University of Michigan. One of two measures of happiness used by the Michigan researchers recently corroborated the earlier finding by European researchers that Nigerians are the happiest people in the world. The second measure finds that Nigeria ranks 19th happiest.

The Gallop poll places Nigeria as the 27th happiest country. In this poll, Latin American countries dominate the top and the European and North American countries that aggregate atop the Forbes list fall to the mid range of Gallop’s ranking.

Why would highly reputable researchers come up with results so starkly contradictory?  The answer, my friend, is in the definition and measurement of happiness.

Try it. Come up with your own measurement of happiness. How do you know whether you are a happy person? It is probably a matter of how you feel inside. So, how do you project this to others? When, for instance, you say of someone that he or she is a happy person, what do you mean? How do you know?

You could say that the person smiles all the time. Or that he or she is always friendly. But are these really true measures of happiness? As social scientists would ask, how much validity can you credit them? Not much.

Smiling is a personality characteristic, and not necessarily an indication of good feelings. A person could be sad within and smile routinely nonetheless. Conversely, a habitual placid expression doesn’t necessarily denote sadness.

So, how is happiness to be measured? Well, though there is a plethora of research around the world to measure it, it can hardly be measured objectively. That is why the rankings are colliding with each other. Which countries get ranked high depends on what the researchers believe to be measures of happiness.

In this regard, the study published by Forbes is readily the most invalid of all. In fact, Forbes may have been dishonest with its readers when it labeled the ranking as that of happiness. The article is based on the Legatum’s Institute’s Index of Prosperity.

To equate prosperity with happiness cross-culturally goes against everything we know about life. It overlooks the fact that happiness is a function of various non-material factors, especially the quality of personal relations with family and friends.

That is why, with all its prosperity, the Western world still suffers from a high level of serious psychological problems, such as chronic depression and anxiety. And these are not abating.

Legatum used measures of the nation’s “economy, entrepreneurship, governance, education, health, safety, personal freedom and social capital” as the basis for its index. By that measure, most developing countries are clustered at the bottom of the happiness list.

While Legatum’s factors are valid for assessing the material quality of life, they barely touch on that intangible of personal relations. The closest to this is the factor of social capital – the extent of trust and such societal virtues – that characterises any given society. But even this does not necessarily account for how individuals feel.

For instance, I would guess that most Nigerians have made peace with corruption and fraud. Therefore, these elements of low social capital are less likely to cause personal disquiet to the extent of affecting the general happiness.

For instance, if a Nigerian buys batteries from a street corner kiosk, he knows that there is a chance that they may have little or no life left. If that turns out to be the case, it would cause momentary irritation, probably a shaking of the head and a shrug. Such things have become too routine to fundamentally affect the person’s happiness.

The polls that have Nigeria and other developing countries on top of the happiness index are those that rely primarily or substantially on individuals’ assessment of their happiness.

The recent University of Michigan survey that has Nigeria on top of the list was based on answers to the question of how happy the interviewees felt. When responses to that question are combined with responses to how satisfied they are with their lives, Nigeria falls to No. 19 as the happiest country. That is still much better than the ranking of 20th saddest country.

Gallop’s index is based on people’s response to questions about their experience the previous day. Did they smile a lot? Did they feel respected? Did they get rested? And such.

Perhaps, the closest thing to a scientifically valid measure of happiness would be the same technique used for measuring pleasure. To compare the pleasure derived from different wines, for instance, researchers hook up tasters to a gadget that measures brainwaves that specifically respond to pleasure.

For measuring happiness, that would require hooking up a sizable sample of people in every country and monitoring the readings 24 hours a day for, say, a 30-day period. The average measure of sustained pleasure for a given country would be the country’s measure of happiness.

The problem is that the billions of dollars it would cost to administer such a study would be more gainfully used to lift several countries out of poverty.

I am sure you would agree with me that this made a good read.