By Valentine Achum
We must start to place the interest and plights of our suffering people high on top of our action agenda – Jerry J. Rawlings
In chapter four of his book, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, written in 1789, Jeremy Bentham proposed a method of working out the sum total of pleasure and pain produced by an act, and thus the total value of its consequence. He proposed that when determining what action is right in a given situation, we should consider the pleasures and pains resulting from it in respect of their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity and extent. This idea is a utilitarian principle, which stresses that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people that is the measure of right and wrong, and that the best moral action is the one that maximises the well-being of sentient entities. This principle is called the hedonistic or felicific calculus.
In 2011, exactly 222 years since Bentham propounded this idea, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) passed a resolution inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their citizens to help guide their public policies in responding to what makes their citizens happy. Although, the 2016 World Happiness Report places Denmark as the happiest country in the world, Bhutan – a country in southern Asia – however, became the first country to officially adopt Gross National Happiness (GNH), instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), as her main development indicator.
However, the variables used in ranking countries, according to how happy its citizens are, include GDP per capita, social support, life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and trust. With Denmark taking the lead in this ranking, Switzerland and Iceland are the second and third happiest countries in the world, while Norway, Finland, Canada, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Austria and Sweden follow – as fourth to 10th positions, respectively, with the United States of America (U.S.A.) in the 13th position.
Out of the 157 countries ranked, Nigeria occupies the 131st position. This means that Nigerians are happier than only 12 countries out of the remaining 156 countries. Indeed! Not a type of score sheet to be happy about. We are suffering, but, certainly, not smiling, as widely portrayed. For when one is being beaten by excruciating sun, one’s frown unveils one’s teeth such that it looks like one is actually smiling.
However, the least our government could do to put smiles on the faces of the generality of Nigerians has already been prescribed in Section 14 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, wherein lies that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. Perversely, when a set of people described as herdsmen can wake up one morning and do mini-mini-mani-mo, at which place to kill and destroy speaks volume about how ‘secured’ the life of the average Nigerian really is. Prices of basic commodities such as rice, tomato, yam, garri, kerosene, among others, seem to be romancing the sky – without any corresponding increase in workers’ pay – says a whole lot about how ‘guaranteed’ our welfare truly is. Our naira, which used to be equivalent to the U.S. dollar under Muhammadu Buhari’s military regime, is now at its weakest and volatile state under the same Buhari as civilian President. When one could stay a whole week without power, with only a comfortable be-careful-how-you-criticise-government explanation to the cause of epileptic power supply by a government representative is a big smite on one’s happiness and a promotion of our misery rate.
Sincerely, the average Nigerian cares less about who is being investigated for corruption charges or how much is being recovered from the anti-graft war. What he really cares about is his security and welfare. Can he get the best medical attention within this country without having to pay from his nose? Can he get good education for his kids, or scholarship for his kids without knowing one oga-at-the-top, somewhere? Can he comfortably move around for business on good roads? Can he get an appreciable degree of electric power? Can he easily access loans to do business and fulfil his dream of being a successful entrepreneur? Can his child, who has just graduated from college be at the same level with children of the elite when they apply for a job in the public service? Can his income cater for his family’s needs and even enough to take his family on short holiday trip and, occasionally, take his wife out on romantic dates?
I am sure there are many other pertinent questions on your mind, but the basic fact remains that not much has been done by government to make Nigerians happy. Nigerians only try to make themselves happy, and the earlier government starts to realise that an unhappy people cannot be properly united and cannot produce good result, the better. The reason the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) got dissolved was that the people were producing more guns than fun, more weapons than food. They were paying more attention to their enemies than the welfare of their people. And, as the late Professor Claude Ake once instructed, man must eat before he does any other thing.
Although man cannot live by bread alone, it is a more profound truth that man cannot live without ‘bread’. As CNN’s Richard Quest once warned, let us “never count dollars before bodies”. No matter how much is being recovered from Buhari’s fight against corruption, his success in that area would be taken with a pinch of salt if the suffering currently staring us in the face continues unabated. It is not the fight against corrupt people that matters; it is about what measure is being put in place to restrict people from engaging in corrupt practices. It is about strengthening and making corruption busters such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) and the judiciary more independent and impenetrable, and left to do their job – not doing their job for them. This is what President Barack Obama meant when he recommended strong institutions and not strong men. If any single individual can make the EFCC pander to his caprices, it, therefore, means that the fight against corruption is only a waste of time.
What government must, however, focus on is how to put smiles on our scowl faces. This, on its own, will translate into providing the necessary morale for the growth and development we need in other areas of our national and private lives, because a happy man produces better result. It does not require a human resources (HR) expert to understand this, still less a sociologist. It needs no rocket scientist to solve this equation.
• Achum is a post-graduate student at the Department of Political Science, University of Lagos.