According to three surveys published today, most Kenyans will not be traveling off for the Easter weekend, will spend the holiday break in the company of family or friends, plan to spend more money than at this time last year, and are right miserable about it all too.

SURVEYS SAY KENYANS WON’T CELEBRATE EASTER

An survey by Ipsos-Synovate reported in the Daily Nation (‘Fewer Kenyans to travel during Easter’) found that only just under one-in-five people (17 per cent) plan to travel to celebrate Easter. The mainly stay-at-home Kenyans will spend the weekend with their wife or husband (39 per cent), parents or other family members (20 per cent), or with friends (19 per cent). Only five per cent of Kenyans plan to spend the Easter weekend with a ‘romantic partner’ compared to 18 per cent of Ugandans.

It was either another Ipsos-Synovate survey reported in the Business Daily (‘Kenyans plan to splurge on Easter’) or perhaps further results of the same survey published in the Daily Nation, that found that 42 per cent of Kenyans plan to spend more this holiday then they did last year, mainly it seems on clothes (29 per cent) or dining out (35 per cent).

SURVEYS SAY KENYANS NOT HAPPY

So Kenyans have money to spend; there are clothes to be bought and meals to be enjoyed; and not too much in the way of travel-related stress this Easter. So everybody’s happy then? Well, not according to another survey…

Did you know that the 2nd United Nations Conference on Happiness has just finished its deliberations in New York? Honest: and to mark the conference a ‘World Happiness Report’ was published at the behest of the Earth Institute. Yes, people really get paid (taxpayers) money to do this sort of thing (it’s up there with ‘World talk like a pirate day’ that we reported on last November in ‘World Toilet Day – Don’t Laugh, this Sh!t is Serious’).

Anyway, the ‘World Happiness Report’ ranked Kenya as the 25th unhappiest nation on earth. Togo, Benin, the Central African Republic and Sierra Leone were supposedly even more unhappy nations than Kenya but that’s not much comfort. Denmark, Norway, Finland and the Netherlands are among the happiest nations.

KENYA: REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL…

Don’t be too glum dear readers: the Kenya Forum simply does not believe that Kenyans are a miserable bunch: quite the opposite, in fact.

Regular readers may recall that in October, 2011, we published an article entitled, ‘Reasons to be Cheerful and why Kenyans should take pride in their country…’. We stand by it. If you haven’t read it we urge you and the good people of the Earth Institute to do so.

Then there’s the slight matter of contradictory figures. Finland is supposedly one of the happiest country’s in the world according to the ‘World Happiness Report’ but it also has however, one of the highest suicide rates in the world (at 17.7 suicides per 100,000 people compared to Kenya’s 10.1 per thousand). If you’ve ever heard a Finnish joke you’ll understand why.

The suicide rates for miserable old Togo, Benin and Sierra Leone stand at 5.1, 6.5 and 6.6 per 100,000 people respectively. The figures for happy little Netherlands, Norway and Denmark are 7.4, 9.7 and 10.1 per 100,000 head of population.