All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way__ Tolstoy in Anna Karenina
Years ago, a certain report had come up naming my compatriots as the happiest people on earth. A report that sometimes makes you wonder about the parameters through which such judgment was made. It also makes one ponder about what happiness genuinely implies. Does laughter signify happiness? Does the ability to hide pain make one a happy man? The truth is, some people are stronger than others. What breaks one man emboldens another. So, to date, we still don’t know what prompted their report.
Truthfully, we are known as one of the most resilient bunches in the history of humanity. In fact, one of our prophets, whom we wrongly call a musician, said we are people suffering and smiling. Indeed, we are good at hiding our pains with a big, fat, and large smile. However fragile. We may cry in our rooms, complain to our neighbors, shout in the public bus, rant online, but our divine creator was so effective in His craft that He molded us with a clay of hope with touches of all shades of resilience.
The decibel of our pain used to be very low beneath the surface until one bright afternoon, a man working in the government blared out that a man who had lost in the previous election was orchestrating a disaster. He said this failed politician and his supporters were trying to capitalize on the underlying hunger and yet-to-materialize anger of the people, to spur them into mayhem. He further said that these agents of democracy were planning to burn the country down and barricade our fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness.
This was the first time my compatriots came to realize that we have a fundamental human right to pursue happiness. We know of happiness, but God’s truth, we did not know it is something that can be pursued, let alone a human right to its pursuit.
However, God’s truth, we knew we were not happy, just that we didn’t expect this man in government to lay the brick of blame on his fellow politician. And we do not also believe the world must be divided into two boxes: Happy-Sad, Good-Bad, friendly-unfriendly, etc. We believe there are different shades of grey. We used to believe that there is a middle ground, but we don’t have a name for it. But I like to call it bland or blank.
The man in government did not owe us any responsibility to appeal to our expectations. It was a waste of expectations and hope. When has it not been about politics? When has it not been about blame distribution? Even when the government came into power, they had to blame their predecessor even though they were fragments of the same fabric. Same party. Their predecessor blamed the one before it… It has always been a rigmarole. The blame must go to someone, but it must not be the incumbent. It was an unwritten rule.
For my compatriots, many things had informed our unhappiness. At least now that we know we are unhappy, I can tell you about things that informed it. There have been many of them in the last decade, but none is as scorching as what’s now faced by the people. But most painfully, from the coastal villages down to the metropolitan cities, debilitating hunger has eaten deep into society. In all ramifications, families can’t afford to feed. People, especially children, now walk slowly around in the likeness of ghosts due to hunger.
A popular opinion is already taking root among the elite group. The opinion, devoid of human feelings, holds that people should only bring to the world the number of children they can afford to feed and cater for. With the current hunger, many can’t even feed themselves, so it’s logical to say, the opinion implies that the poor shouldn’t bring any child into the world. A subtle version of Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal. Jonathan proposed that the poor and their children should be eaten by the British parliamentarians of his days, but the opinion of today is that the poor should tie their manhood because they are not man enough. Some mothers now whisper about the children that hunger had forced them to abort.
As a researcher and journalist, it’s handy to have a small vocabulary in my line of work. But one hardly knows what stronger vocabulary can be attributed to hunger. The whole issue makes you think the country is recovering from a war. In 1945, the reporter Wilfred Burchett broke the story of a nuclear warhead exploding over the city of Hiroshima for the London Daily Express. He covered what he called “the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war.”
Like Burchett, I am a reporter. My nation has not experienced a physical war recently, but a war of hunger waged by the high and mighty. If one looks out of his or her window, the city has taken on a very gory color. The color of hunger. If you can’t see it, then you are one of the people who built their houses in the high hills and look down at our city through a tiny hole on the wall of your building.
Apart from hunger, other things that informed the unhappiness include deepened poverty and hopelessness. Hope has always been a bleak discussion in our national story, but never has it been bleaker. When Sola Owonibi wrote “Homeless not Hopeless,” hope was still a tenable national currency. But today, hope is a lost coin. Many are indeed homeless and hopeless. Hope itself is a long rope many of my compatriots have hanged themselves with.
In the hospitals, there were corpses every night at the height of death from curable diseases. Some from minute illnesses like malaria. Cholera later broke out in the city because our people now feed from waste bins and dungeons. Seven, twelve, twenty-six, fifty-six, hundred, people now die without meaning, some killed by people trying to survive the harsh economy. The brutality can be reduced to a paragraph, sometimes only a sentence each, but the deep stench of penury ravaging my compatriots can’t be well described in an encyclopedia. It’s indeed a multidimensional destitution and hopelessness that we will need more words and new language to describe.
If you define happiness by Hunger, Hopelessness and Hardship, then we are the happiest people on earth. Call us HHH (Hunger, Hardship and Hopelessness).