Any SA takers for minister of joy?
On Wednesday, the United Arab Emirates named its first-ever minister of state for happiness, giving Ohood Al Roumi the job of making the nation one of the happiest in the world in the next five years.
The UAE was ranked number 20 in the 2015 World Happiness Report by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
How exactly she was to achieve significant improvement on that relatively high ranking was not immediately clear, but Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum promised decisive action.
“National happiness isn’t a wish,” he said in a tweet. “Plans, projects, programmes, indices will inform the work of our ministries to achieve happiness.”
Previously, he had urged civil servants to remember that providing world-class service to citizens was their core mission, with the overall goal of contributing to happiness.
In the same 2015 happiness survey, South Africa was ranked 113 out of 158 countries measured, coming in as slightly more unhappy than wartorn Iraq and significantly unhappier than the absolute monarchy of Swaziland. South Africa, the report found, had seen a faster increase in unhappiness since 2005 than all but 12 countries, which included Greece and the Central African Republic.
Happiness is an inherently subjective measure, but the differences between countries, and groups within countries, point to some universal influences. Among them are a sense of safety, belief in opportunities and generosity within a society.
Or, as Sheik Mohammed put it in a recent poem: “While some struggle with obstacles and strain/ Our people are sheltered from agony and pain./ Their children wrapped in peace, they do not fear,/ For their wishes and desires, they need not shed a tear.”
The idea of basing government policy on the need to maximise happiness is credited to Jigme Singye Wangchuck, king of Bhutan, who coined the phrase “gross national happiness” (as opposed to gross domestic product or GDP) in the 1970s. The tiny country’s government first implemented the policy on what it called an “intuitive” level, but later sought to quantify both happiness and the interventions that would increase it. And its experience in doing so, the Gross National Happiness Commission in that country says, shows that government services and policy are central.
Bhutan considers gross national
happiness to rest on four pillars:
determines the conditions in which Bhutanese thrive”;
development, which must feature free time and leisure;
of culture, through “cultural resilience”; and
not only to ensure the availability of resources such as water, but also for “aesthetic and other stimulus that can be directly healing to people who enjoy vivid colours and light, untainted breeze and silence in nature’s sound”.