By Mohamed Sankoh (One Drop)
I’m sadly happy that it has to take the “World Happiness Report 2025” to show unapologetic supporters and defenders of the ruling Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) how unhappy they are in their happiness. Sierra Leone has just breasted the tape before Afghanistan by a strand of hair: 146 out of 147 countries!
It is only opinionated fools in the SLPP, or those who are beneficiaries of the seemingly state-sponsored grand corruption that is permeating our nation, who will dispute the fact that majority of ordinary Sierra Leoneans are sadly sad about the current state of affairs in their country. So, it does not come as a surprise to me that the only people Sierra Leoneans are now happier than are the Afghans whom the Talibans have sucked dry all happiness from just like how President Julius Maada Bio and his band of Paopaists seem to have done to majority of Sierra Leoneans.
Few days ago, just after the publication of the World Happiness Report 2025, one of my Paopaist friends shrugged it off—saying that “happiness is a state of mind” and that as far as he knew or was concerned; he was a happy man by every definition of the word. But I can understand such retort from someone who speaks the same mother tongue with President Bio’s; someone who was appointed by President Bio simply because he has the same “tribal work ethics” like the President who doesn’t hailed from “Limbaland” or “Temneland” (courtesy of that infamous presidential interview on Radio Democracy FM 98.1); someone whose mansion doesn’t taste the blackish taste of blackout like President Bio’s State Lodge because there is always a stand-by generator standing by, and from a man who could fly first-class like President Bio at the expense of the state’s shoestring budget!
Even in Heaven; there are archangels and ordinary angels. And even among the archangels; there are the first amongst equals (Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel). So, when the World Happiness Report 2025 says Sierra Leoneans are the unhappiest people globally; it has already sieved the handful of the privileged who are privileged to be knifing and forking the national cake with the seemingly acquiescence of the Commander-in-Chief! That Report is simply talking about the state of mind of majority of ordinary Sierra Leoneans!
Now for a start, let us get an operational definition of what “happiness” is for today’s One Dropian dropping. According to one definition, which source I might have eaten with Potato Leaves, “Happiness is a state of emotional well-being that is characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. It can be experienced either in a narrow sense, when good things happen in a specific moment, or more broadly, as a positive evaluation of one’s life and accomplishments overall. Positive emotions such as pleasure, comfort, gratitude, hope, and inspiration increase our happiness and move us to flourish…”
With that operational definition, above, of what “happiness” is; it will be safe, or even logical, to state that the World Happiness Report 2025 does not do any justice to Afghanistan by making Sierra Leone breast the tape before it by a strand of hair. Sierra Leone should not have even been placed in the same sentence with “happiness” simply because what the SLPP-Bio led government has done to majority of ordinary Sierra Leoneans is to have put them in permanent states of discomfort, hopelessness, and joylessness! The Taliban in Afghanistan has never put up any pretense of practicing any form of Democracy. But while the SLPP government of President Bio pretends to practice Democracy; it has been creating more anti-civil liberty laws than those of the Talibans (The Cyber Security And Crime Act, 2021 and the Counter-Terrorism Act of 2025.)!
In the last six years, the only Sierra Leoneans in Sierra Leone who appear to be in “a state of emotional well-being that is characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment” are President Bio with members of his family (both nuclear and extended), presidential appointees, and beneficiaries of the seemingly state-sponsored grand corruption that is permeating our nation! For majority of ordinary Sierra Leoneans; happiness is only seen either in Hollywood movies or in fairytale books!
It is a pitiable pity that citizens in war-torn countries like Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and even Libya can be presumed to be happier than Sierra Leoneans whose SLPP-Bio led government believes they have done more than enough for them to be happily happy! But as my Paopaist friend opines, earlier in this One Dropian dropping, “happiness is a state of mind”. He believes, arrogantly like most Paopaists, that a man can be eating frogs for dinner daily yet he can be a happy person.
That “frogs for dinner” allusion gives me the frightening feeling that my Paopaist friend might be insinuating that he is following the eating “ethics” of someone who is said to be a glutton. But for an undiluted Freetong Boy like me (who was born, bred, and educated in Freetown), frogs-eating is something unheard of. Even those that were born at “Frog Tong” (as Brookfields was colloquially called when I was growing up at “Soja Tong” in Freetown’s Central One of old) never cultivated the habit of eating frogs for dinner let alone eating them to scare any form of hunger!
But as one character in “Prison Break” notes, “We are who we are”; so, while the World Happiness Report 2025 paints Sierra Leoneans in Sierra Leone as unhappy people, the Paopaists believe it is not so. It is just like an argument of whether frogs are delicacies or not can be determined by which “Land” of Sierra Leone a Sierra Leonean was born in!
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