third<\/a>\u00a0in 2015. \u00a0Authors of the Report are usually drawn from experts from diverse disciplines – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and so on and so forth. The 2016 Report includes the ranking of 157 countries based on survey data from 2013 to 2015. Each country had an average sample size of 3,000 people who answered questions pertaining to six variables: gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, generosity and absence of corruption.<\/p>\nIn the 2016 Report, Nigeria was ranked the 103rd happiest nation in the world, down from its 78th ranking in 2015. It also slipped from being the second happiest country in Africa in 2015 to being the sixth happiest in the continent. \u00a0Globally Denmark emerged the world\u2019s happiest country in the world while Algeria, which was ranked 38th globally, maintains its position as the happiest country in Africa. African countries dominate the bottom of the table.<\/p>\n
I have some issues with the World Happiness Report:<\/p>\n
One, the greatest utility of the Report, in my opinion, is in calling attention to the fact that happiness \u2013 just like the notion of work-life balance – deserves a priority place in government policies and ought to be part of the primary indicators of the quality of human development in any country. In fact following the first \u00a0 UN High Level Meeting on \u00a0\u2018Happiness and Well-Being\u2019 on April 2 2012, Bhutan became the first and only country so far to have replaced Gross Domestic Product (GDP) with Gross National Happiness (GNH) as its main development indicator.<\/p>\n
Two, from all indications, the Report appears to be concerned with \u2018national happiness\u2019 or the \u2018happiness of nations\u2019 rather than the happiness of people who make up the nations. For this reason, the variables of interest – GDP, healthy life expectancy, social support, generosity and absence of corruption \u2013 measure a country\u2019s well-being and not strictly speaking \u2018happiness\u2019 – defined as mental or emotional state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions that could range from contentment to intense joy. For instance if the rate of suicide is used as a metric for measuring unhappiness, (the opposite of happiness), \u00a0then quite some of the countries which are ranked among the top 20 happiest countries in the world will also feature among the top 20 with the highest suicide rates in the world. A crucial question therefore is whether a country\u2019s well-being is synonymous with the happiness of its citizens. People in some rural areas\u00a0 who are abjectly poor but have no idea of what it means\u00a0 not to be poor cannot be convinced that they are unhappy because the GDP of their countries have dropped or because some unseen government politicians looted their country\u2019s treasury.<\/p>\n
An even more important question is whether happiness is dependent on societal structures and environmental variables (as suggested by the World Happiness Report) or is strictly an individual\u2019s choice that is independent of his or her social and material circumstances? The 14th Dalai Lama would say that happiness \u201cis not something readymade. It comes from your own actions.\u201d Mahatma Gandhi, the preeminent leader of the Indian independence movement in British-ruled India defined happiness as \u201cwhen what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.\u201d For the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy: \u201cIf you want to be happy, be.\u201d\u00a0 In essence, for Dalai Lama, Ghandi, Tolstoy and several others, happiness is an individual choice that is independent of the society, its structures and enabling or disenabling conditions and not something to be measured using \u00a0variables that can only capture a nation\u2019s well-being. This means therefore that one cannot really talk of a happy or unhappy nation, but of happy or unhappy individuals.<\/p>\n
Three, the World Happiness Report may unwittingly be reinforcing an essentialist construction of Africa and the narratives and innuendos that go with it. Since its chosen variables can only measure well being, wealth and democracy (freedom), which are areas that actually define Africa\u2019s condition of underdevelopment, it becomes axiomatic that African countries will not do well in such rankings.\u00a0 But a fundamental reason why they underperform in such rankings is the condition of underdevelopment which has already been captured in the key index that defines developed and underdeveloped economies. \u00a0Several of the symptoms of this fundamental problem of underdevelopment are curiously being captured in a pick-and- choose manner by several indices such as the United Nations Human Development Index, the Ease of Doing Business Index among countries, the Sustainable Governance Index etc. It is like using four different indices, each ranking people according to how healthy they look, their physical strength, how briskly they walk and how fast they can run. A man who is severely ill with malaria and has suffered loss of appetite as a result will be poorly captured by each of the four indices even though his only problem is that he is suffering from malaria. This is Africa\u2019s major problem with several of these indices. \u00a0And it is both essentialist and reductionist.<\/p>\n
Four, how will the Buhari regime interpret the World Happiness Report 2016? Are Nigerians becoming more \u2018wailing wailers\u2019 under him, as his critics will argue and as the Report suggests on face value? \u00a0The answer to this can be both \u2018yes\u2019 and \u2018no\u2019. Though the 2016 Report was based on survey data from 2013 to 2015, Buhari was inaugurated as President in May 2015, meaning that part of the period covered by the data used in the ranking came from the time of his presidency. However he cannot take all the blame because a disproportionate chunk of the data used in compiling the report also came from the time of the Jonathan presidency.<\/p>\n
Promoting education and health: The Bauchi state example<\/strong><\/p>\nI am quite impressed with Bauchi state government\u2019s 2016 revenue and expenditure estimates. \u00a0Of its budget budget proposal of N47, 306,964,985, it allocated 52% to capital expenditure and 48 per cent to recurrent expenditure. More importantly, the state has one of the highest (if not the highest allocation) to the education sector in this country. It allocated the sum of N26, 736,579,182 (a whopping 20% of its total budget) to the education sector. According to the state government, the projects and programmes it intends to pursue to realize its goal of qualitative education include the purchase of furniture, supply of instructional materials, library books and equipment, construction of more public schools as well as rehabilitation of existing ones. Though the allocation to the education sector fell short of the 26 per cent recommended by UNESCO\u00a0 and the 30 per cent allocation canvassed by \u00a0some Nigerian educationists, it is\u00a0 certainly one of the highest (if not the highest ever allocation) to education by any government in the country \u2013 federal or state. \u00a0Remarkably there is no elephant project (such as establishing a state University) to gulp this relatively huge allocation, which is commendable.<\/p>\n
Bauchi state\u2019s allocation to education compares favourably with El-Rufai\u2019s ambitious education programme in Kaduna state. Of Kaduna state\u2019s 2016 budget of N171.7bn, education received N27.5bn (about 16%). It should be recalled that in 2014 the federal government made a big bone of the fact that it increased the allocation to the education sector to 10.7 per cent, up from 8.7 per cent in 2013.<\/p>\n
In addition to an impressive 20 per cent allocation to education, the Bauchi state government also \u00a0gave the second highest allocation of N19,685,311,922 (15%) to the health sector. This is one of the few times in the history of this country that budgetary allocation to the health sector by any government in the country \u2013 state or federal \u2013 has met the 15 per cent recommended by both the World Bank and the World Health Organisation. Thumbs up to the Bauchi State government and its Governor Mohammed Abdullahi Abubakar for these bold steps. I pray the state does not derail at the level of implementation.<\/p>\n
Email: pcjadibe@yahoo.com<\/p>\n
Twitter: @JideoforAdibe<\/p>\n
\n
\n
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