The economic benefits of recognising our ‘shujaas’

By XNIRAKI

Kenya’s Mashujaa Day comes immediately after the Nobel prizes are announced. We did not get the Literature one we thought we would through Ngugi wa Thiong’o, but we are nonetheless proud we bagged one through the late Wangari Maathai.

Nobel prizes are signs of global heroism and are given to men and women who have dedicated their lives to noble causes and exceeded expectations.

Nobel prizes, apart from awarding money to the winners, energise every generation to aspire for higher ideals. It is possible that they add a few percentage points to the global GDP. After all, nothing motivates people to work more than prizes.

Winning prizes

We all love winning prizes whether in academia or on golf courses.

In the work place, promotions can be seen as prizes that everyone works towards. The ultimate prize is to be the big boss — the CEO or MD. In social life, marrying someone you love and keeping off competitors can be seen as a prize you treasure all your life. Pastors never forget to remind of the prizes that await us for doing good.

If prizes are that powerful and everyone want to become a shujaa by winning one, why have n’t we come up with a recognition system to reward national performers and inspire the next generation to higher ideals? 

One of the regrets of the last 50-years is the failure to create a shujaa system where heroes are rewarded in every sector. In the absence of that, the only people who seem to get recognised are the politicians. No wonder everyone wants to be one.

The absence of a hero recognition system has bred a crop of fake heroes. Read our newspapers or watch TV — fake heroes dominate.

They include the gangsters, the corrupt guys who grab public land, politicians who get voted in because they used nepotism to employ as many people as possible from their village, conmen who sold non-existent land and students who cheat in exams. We could even view the 2008 chaos as competition for heroism gone awry.

Interestingly, one of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, Eugene Fama, is famous for his work on efficient market hypothesis, which loosely translated means that you cannot cheat the market. You cannot be a fake hero; the market will unmask you.

However our hero recognition system is not efficient, no wonder so many heroes pass as real. To celebrate 50-years, the Jubilee regime needs to give us a shujaa recognition system. We need to look forward to our “Nobel Prizes” on Mashujaa Day.

I have no doubt that if the government started such an initiative, there would be lots of donations through M-Pesa.

Unique to Kenya

We could even call the prizes Wangari Maathai Prizes. Imagine the President announcing on Mashujaa Day the winners in economics, medicine, chemistry, peace, literature and physics. We could add engineering, entrepreneurship and other areas unique to Kenya such as horticulture.

Such awards will pull the country together. We could even make them East Africa-wide or cascade them to the counties. Governors could recognise their heroes on the same day.

As long as we do not a have a system of recognising them, heroes will continue leaving the country or drifting into politics where their heroism usually fades. We cannot deny that there have been private initiatives to recognise heroes, but a national system is long overdue.

A hero recognition system will act as an economic stimulus, it will unleash our creative energies, spawning new thinking and turning the reluctant wheel of progress faster.  We salute all the heroes, recognised or not. Of special mention are the veterans of the Mau Mau liberation war and African veterans of World War I and II who, unlike their British counterparts, were never buried in Commonwealth cemeteries.. 

The writer is a lecturer and MBA programme coordinator, University of Nairobi.

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