There has been the index characterisation – the least corrupt and the least happy, together with Yemen, North Korea and Syria. If, for the sake of argument, we accept the first as being more or less correct, we are also obliged to accept the second as also being accurate.
It must be important to pin down which element of the population is so unhappy – the young, the old, the urban or rural dwellers, the frustrated employed or the frustrated unemployed? Are there pockets where unhappiness and discontent is most intense – maybe the North East or the inhabitants of the Kgalagadi and Okavango areas? And what underlies this unhappiness – disillusionment with the education and health systems – with the prioritising of government expenditure which rates fighter jets as a more pressing national need than the printing of patient and laboratory forms let alone the most basic of medicines, with the unavailability of land and the failings of the Land Boards, perhaps with a continued inability to achieve redress, or perhaps with the stifling of democratic government as a result of the capture by the Executive of so many arms of government.
