Nigeria

LONDON – There are 101 small – and not so small – things that are starting to go right in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. But the big thing is not happening – persuading the electorate that after twenty years of gross mismanagement followed by the austere belt tightening and pruning of the democratic rule of President Olusegun Obasanjo, that their lives can be better. Obasanjo is not popular. Only if Obasanjo can turn this negative psychological state around in the coming eighteen months of his final term will Nigeria’s forward momentum into the future be secured. Otherwise his successor will be feel pressured to raid the piggy bank – where Nigeria’s bountiful oil earnings are stored for a rainy day – and buy his/her way into cheap popularity by offering to cut petrol prices, subsidize food, boost civil service employment and all the other wasteful expenditures that Obasanjo has...

LONDON – In mid 1999 only three weeks into his first term of office President Olusegun Obasanjo had to send the army into Warri, an important oil town, in the Niger delta. Around two hundred people were killed by intertribal fighting over confused land ownership. Obasanjo flew into Warri and started negotiations between the fighting groups. Six years later there is now peace between the three tribes who fought each other the most, the Ijaws, the Urhobo and the Itsekeri. He also promised to substantially increase the proportion of federal revenues going to the delta states. Nevertheless, sporadic violence has continued through the Obasanjo era, with the army and police sometimes responding viciously. Periodically, panicky articles appear in the local press quoting the oil companies – in particular Shell, by far the biggest – as fearing for the lives of their employees and threatening to shut down their oil wells....

IDAH, KOGI STATE, NIGERIA – I am sitting here, my laptop open on my knee, sheltered from the baking sun by a great shade tree in this upcountry village, twelve hours drive inland from Lagos, determined before Christmas to find an answer to that elusive question that has pursued mankind down the ages: what makes for human happiness? There is a good and sensible reason to believe I might uncover the answer here- or at least some of it. The World Values Survey, an inter-university study, recently issued a report in which it found that Nigerians are the happiest people in the world. (The Americans are 16th on their list, the British 24th and the Russians the unhappiest. The survey, which has studied happiness since 1945, finds that it has not increased in Europe and North America even though the societies have become wealthier. The desire for material goods, it concludes,...