Of course, if you include several maximum security prisons, our ranking could get better. The countries we have beaten are well-known strife factories. Many of them have been ravaged by internal wars and bickering and leaders who are basically procurement officers trying to milk the national coffers.
So people in these countries could well have faces that look like they have just swallowed a whole truck of bitter lemons. This past weekend the happiness index came under heavy artillery attack courtesy of two ladies bent on assaulting the happiness index while riding in a commuter bus.
According to what the clip showed, one lady alighted from the commuter bus and as she folded that little seat by the door commonly referred to as six nine, it triggered the wrath of one lady who was seated inside the mini bus. Apparently the seat had grazed her arm and clearly you don’t do that to the arms of this lady. Usually when ladies fight there’s a rule, possibly learnt from Girls Fighting School, of going for each other’s hair. But these ladies bucked the trend and slapped each other silly. The lady who was getting off the bus seemingly didn’t even have a white belt in ratho, the most basic form of martial arts, and was on the receiving end of some good slaps.
Obviously the standard national response to such incidents (and almost every other incident these days) is to take a picture or a video and do absolutely nothing to separate the two. You could be facing an imminent lion attack and the guy with the gun instead of pulling out his gun would pull out his IPhone 15 Pro Max Apple and whirr away to record the sad episode.
When you check Facebook profiles of most of our people, you will find they call themselves content creators. This means they don’t care about saving anyone’s miserable life and hairstyle but are more concerned with taking pictures and videos to get more content for their pages and fans.
Content going viral is the mantra these days and the content creators are basically on a mission to feed their pages. As usual all sorts of people waded in with their thoughts to explain the happiness index-sapping fracas. Facebook warriors, pseudo-psychologists, psychiatrists, commuters, instant psychics and every person who believes in their opinion tried to weigh in with their homemade root cause analysis. Most were actually puzzled by the fact that the six-nine seat could trigger a Third World Ward and put it to underlying issues that have been bubbling under the surface. Perhaps she was angered by an ex-boyfriend who is behind in child maintenance.
Ex-boyfriends are now a menace and some have morphed into little projects for magistrates. So basically the root cause of the slap-fight is possibly some issues of lack of happiness and peace and had nothing to do with the six-nine seat. Our president is trying his best to improve the happiness index in our country and beyond. Recently he sent a convoy of vehicles to Namibia – a country shorn of happiness after the death of its president. He is also proposing that people from Zimbabwe should not use passports to cross into Botswana anymore but their national identity card would suffice.
This is going to push us farther down the rankings because there could be an influx of people from a country whose happiness index is lower than ours. Surely we have enough sour and surly faces here and we cannot afford to have any more. So if we are serious about pushing up the rankings, we should extend this wonderful proposal to countries like Finland, Denmark and Iceland which are the Top 3.
This could seriously improve the rankings as we would have more people who are now capable of laughing at the most mundane things and finding happiness easily in their daily lives. These are people that become happy from watching the stars and watching a pig cross the road – something which usually angers locals. (For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a Rapporteur and training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected]
