We’ve all endured the consequences of corruption, from rolling blackouts to potholes, from schools without textbooks to hospitals without supplies. There’s a seemingly endless list and you’ll have your own favourites. But there’s another cost, which is that corruption, and having to share our lives with so many criminals in all walks of life, is making us generally unhappy as well.

Last year, Reader’s Digest magazine ran a “global experiment” to gauge the honesty of people in 16 cities around the world. Well, I say around the world, but just like the world tours of some famous musicians from the West don’t include African stops as part of the world, this test didn’t include any African cities.

It’s still interesting, though. What the magazine did was load 193 wallets with a name, a cellphone number, a family photo, business cards and coupons, and whatever the equivalent was of $50 in the local currency.

Then it dropped 12 wallets in each of the 16 cities,  leaving them in parks, near shopping malls and on the pavement. And then it deployed a rigorous research methodology: “We watched to see what would happen.”

The most dishonest city, or what Reader’s Digest prefers to call “the least honest city”, which I think is perhaps missing the mark, was Lisbon, Portugal, where only one out of the 12 wallets was returned. “A couple in their 60s spotted our wallet and immediately called us. Interestingly, our reporter learnt that the two weren’t from Lisbon at all — they were visiting from Holland. The remaining 11 wallets were taken, money and all.” That probably qualifies as zero out of 12 then.

People in Madrid weren’t much better, returning only two out of 12. Next worse was Zurich (four out of 12), a result which featured a detail that “a tram driver in his early 50s pocketed the wallet, despite the fact that the transit company runs the city’s lost and found office”.

Rio de Janeiro and Bucharest tied on four, Warsaw and London on five, and Berlin and Ljubljana (that’s in Slovenia) returned six out of 12. Residents of Amsterdam and Moscow returned seven out of 12.

I might as well finish the list with the more honest cities. New York City and Budapest did well, with eight out of 12 wallets returned, and in Mumbai an impressive nine were returned. The clear winner in the honesty stakes was Helsinki, Finland, where 11 out of the 12 wallets were returned.

Of the 192 wallets dropped by Reader’s Digest, 90 were returned, so 47%. The conclusion the editors drew from the test was this: “Age is no predictor of whether a person is going to be honest or dishonest; young and old both kept or returned wallets; male and female were unpredictable; and comparative wealth seemed no guarantee of honesty. There are honest and dishonest people everywhere.”

At this point, I assume you’ve had the same thought I did. I wonder how well, or how badly, South Africa would have scored if Joburg or Cape Town had been included. A few years ago I invited one of the early social media influencers to give a talk at a conference I helped to host. This guy’s social media trick was that he’d leave his bag with a drone, cameras and sound gear in the middle of a road in lower-income places around the world, filming it clandestinely. The stuff had never been stolen.

He tried the same thing in a South African township, and lo and behold — his bag wasn’t stolen. Score one for South Africa. Unfortunately, the next day he was having coffee at a place in Loop Street, and his bag was nicked from under his table. We had to pay to have his drone replaced, which I thought was a little unfair.

When the magazine interviewed one of the Finns who returned a wallet, a 27-year-old businessman named Lasse Luomakoski, he said: “Finns are naturally honest. We are a small, quiet, closely knit community. We have little corruption, and we don’t even run red lights.” And a couple in their 60s, from a working-class area, said: “Of course we returned the wallet. Honesty is an inner conviction.”

I learnt about this Reader’s Digest test in a story this week about Finland being declared the happiest country in the world, for the seventh year running. The World Happiness Report was launched in 2012, apparently to promote the UN’s sustainable development goals. The survey asks people to evaluate their lives on a scale of one to 10, with 10 the highest. This year, as usual, the top spots were occupied by Scandinavian countries. The US and Germany fell out of the top 20, and bottom of the list of 143 countries is Afghanistan, with a score of only 1.7 compared with Finland’s 7.7 and Denmark’s 7.6. Israel is at No 5 with a score of 7.3, but one imagines that must have changed in the past year.

The first African countries on the list are Libya (66) and Mauritius (70). South Africa comes in at an unhappy 83, with a score of 5.4. Nigeria is even worse, at 102, with a score of five.

I can’t help drawing the obvious conclusion. In countries where corruption is rife, people are unhappy. In fact, and more than coincidentally, in last year’s Transparency International corruption perceptions index of 180 countries, South Africa ranked No 83. Exactly the same position as on the World Happiness Report.

In an article in Daily Maverick, Accountability Now’s Paul Hoffman writes: “Because it poses an existential threat to the country, corruption must be treated as much more than a form or type of crime that can be countered like all other crime. The Constitutional Court has warned that corruption ‘threatens to fell at the knees virtually everything we hold dear and precious in our hard-won constitutional order’. Corruption is no ordinary crime.”

Hoffman also argues that South Africa is doomed, because the anticorruption machinery of state is controlledby the executive branch of government. In effect, that’s putting the fox in charge of the chickens.

But it’s the words “existential threat” that interest me. He means that corruption is a threat to the survival of our country, but thinking about the reports referenced above, it’s also a threat to the quality of our existence. We’re pessimistic, unhappy, and many are, I think, losing hope.

Transparency International asks two questions about corruption: “Is corruption widespread throughout the government or not?” and “Is corruption widespread within businesses or not?” So this isn’t just about politicians.

But what’s even more distressing about our ranking of 83 on the World Happiness Report is that, if you look at how happiness rankings vary by age group, it gets even worse. The happiness ranking for what they term “the young”, people under 30, puts us at 87 on the list. When they do the numbers for people over 60, we move up one place to 82.

Country rankings for the young and the old are quite different in some countries. For example, Lithuania ranks first for those under 30 compared with 44th for those over 60. There are many countries where the rankings for the young are more than 40 places higher than for the old, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America.

It’s sad that our young people are unhappier than our old people. Of course, perceptions of corruption are just one of the variables. Others in the report include GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, “having someone to count on”, generosity and freedom to make life choices. But for us, corruption is probably the enabling mechanism for all the other issues to which South Africa is prey.

As Hoffman says in his article, while the government of national unity is — I would say might be — cause for optimism, citizens are still going to have to keep a watchful eye so that we don’t slide even further into the mire of corruption.