Happiness in Nigeria: Chasing a Mirage?

 Andrew A. Moemeka

Happiness is not a personal object; it is a universal property. It is large enough for all human beings to share from it satisfactorily, yet it is extremely elusive when the search for it is motivated by strict personal gain or morbid selfishness. True happiness derives from actions and behavior motivated by love, trust, honesty, respect, duty, responsibility and tolerance. These ethical factors do not obtain through convenience but deliberate and conscientious actions dictated by the need for creating understanding and building a harmonious community – a harmonious nation.Both leaders and the public in Nigeria are, by their actions, seeking happiness, which has been described as “the ultimate desire of humans on earth.” But to achieve this ultimate objective, there is need to follow the ‘right’ path, and create harmony in society. It requires people to consciously imbibe the right behavior. Short-cuts or taking the easy way out complicates issues. The political, economic and social fate of Nigeria has shown that selfishness, egocentrism, hatred, false image-building, exploitation and inordinate ambition do not produce harmony, positive development or happiness. As the Nation has bitterly learnt, these anti-social behaviors lead to deceit, disappointment, falsehood, disillusionment, heart-break, insecurity and despair.

The socio-economic campaign now being waged against communalistic principles is a campaign against ethical standards, which the ‘optimists’ consider too strict to allow for personal freedom and rights without responsibilities.  It is a vote for convenience – that is, for doing things the way one feels good doing them. But when freedom is detached from responsibility - from objective truth - it becomes impossible to establish personal rights on a firm rational basis; and the ground is laid for society to be at the mercy of the unscrupulous, the unrestrained will of dubiously selfish individuals and/or the subtle yet oppressive totalitarianism of public authority. 

The utility of anything stands and falls with the values which it embodies and promotes. This is true of convenience as it is of personal freedom. It is also true of ethical standards. What has happened in Nigeria in the past thirty to fifty years, has shown that the ‘values’ of convenience-of-action and of personal freedom (or rights)  have, to the detriment of the Nation, gained widespread acceptance. But as Keith Tester (1997: p. 2) has noted –

A community possessed of rights, which has failed to grow into duties, would be socially imbecile. The rights of the members would be worthless; their liberty, a sham; their government, if they had one, the laughing stock of the world.

The values of the ethical standards embodied in communalistic principles, though often drowned by the euphoric noise of superficial selfish contentment, constantly rear up their wisdom heads, beckoning on society to take a hard look at itself and return to the path of sanity, honesty, justice, self-control, moderation and humane behavior. However, majority of the people in Nigeria are modernity-conscious, restless, and selfish; they are the end-justifies-the-means, and get-rich-quick individuals. They are dead-bent not to listen to the call for a return to cultural moral principles. Any chance of coercing them to do otherwise is seriously negated by the nonchalant, selfish and greedy attitudes of our leaders. But the truth remains that as long as Nigeria continues to ignore the positive controls and restraints of communalistic principles or what American and European social scientists have now called Communitarianism, so long will the nation continue to face serious political, economic, social and cultural/moral problems. 

It is worth noting here that the call for return to authentic and functional communalism as a positive check on the evils of the morbid selfishness and rugged individualism of modernity-conscious Nigerian leaders and citizens, is not a lone voice in the wilderness. The Western world has discovered that there is a widespread misinterpretation of the concepts of freedom, individualism and collectivism; and that much of the social problems facing that continent can be traced to this misconception. Redirecting society back to the true meanings of these concepts does not seem possible or even feasible. In spite of this, a change is seen as very desirable, if not imperative. Hence, a middle-of-the-course social order aimed at creating a happy balance between (or, in fact, replacing) individualism and collectivism has been championed. It is communitarianism (Christians, Ferre, and Fackler, 1993, pp. 44-48; Etzioni, 1993) – a social order whose main goal is the achievement of appropriate and necessary public good without denying the primacy of individual rights. This makes it a comrade-in-arms with communalism for which community welfare is also a primary objective.

It would seem that the world is waking up to the need for placing public good on a pedestal that it deserves – one that ensures that both the community and its individual members work for, and reap the benefits accruing to the community for the benefit of all. This would be recognizing that societal harmony is imperative for sustainable progress and national development. Communalism and/or Communitarianism would appear to be the road to this harmony. All the fundamental principles of communalism point to the need for and provide the ingredients of, social harmony, which paves the way to positive socio-economic and socio-cultural development based on the rationale of public good. 

Harmony as a principle for moral order, says Magesa, 1997, does not mean that people would lose their (authentic) freedom. Harmony is the agent of freedom and is meant to enhance it…Without harmony… greed, selfishness and exploitation – in a word, chaos – set in and triumph over universal moral order.