The United Nations has just released the World Happiness Report 2017, and Nigeria ranks 95 globally on the happiness index. It also ranks 6 when considering the forty four countries included in the report.
Globally the top five include Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland while in Africa the top five spots go to Algeria, Mauritius, Libya, Morocco and Somalia.
All these countries rank high when you consider all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.
On the map of the Geography of Happiness, published in an earlier World Happiness Report Update 2015, the happiest countries in the world are shaded green, the unhappiest red. Africa stands out as the unhappiest continent, being coloured almost entirely in shades of glaring red.
In 2017, the WHR reports that average ladder scores for over four in five African countries are below the mid-point of the scale.
And only two African countries have made significant gains in happiness over the past decade.
The story of Nigeria is interesting as measures of subjective well-being, other than Gallup World Poll ones, have, on occasion, ranked Nigeria among the happiest in the world. However, it seems that local reactions to media reports on such high happiness rankings were mixed. Nigerian scholars referred to a ‘Nigerian paradox’ when their country achieved less than credible very high happiness rankings in international studies.
Aaron Agbo and his colleagues, writing in the same handbook on cross-cultural happiness, thought that respondents who indicated that they felt happy might not have meant they were truly happy with their situation, but rather they felt that reporting otherwise ‘could only aggravate the matter’. Saying you are happy might have been a way ‘of counter-acting everyday negative life experiences’, they speculated.
The World Happiness Report, the fifth edition since 2012, ranks 155 countries by their happiness levels. Increasingly, happiness is considered to be the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy. This report continues to gain global recognition as governments, organisations and civil society increasingly use happiness indicators to inform their policy-making decisions.
