Our cast of heroes explains our poverty

By TED MALANDA

KENYA: It appears our heroes are limited to sportsmen, politicians and rabble-rousers — at least those are the ones who hogged the media limelight during the Kenya@50 bash. And that’s why we are dirt poor.

We only celebrated two environmentalists. Now, if our sportsmen run like wizards and our politicians give thunderous speeches while crooks cut down trees, plant cabbages in forests, slaughter elephants and pollute our rivers, you think we are going to be rich?

We didn’t fete doctors, which is amusing because one thing old Jomo set out to do at independence was to eliminate disease. Perhaps that explains why a businessman is battling jiggers today. You mean we have no indigenous doctor who has single-handedly gone out of his or her way to make the treatment of poor people a lifetime passion?

Maybe I was high but I don’t recall an engineer being labelled a hero either. Does that mean none of our boys or girls is so hot at engineering that they have changed the lives of Kenyans?

What, however, tickled me to no end is that our list of heroes did not feature an agriculturist, or a veterinarian, yet we eat like pigs and love our nyama choma so much that we kill to steal livestock. Lord Delemere was a colonial overlord, all right, but as a pioneer farmer and research, he is virtually peerless. But who cares?

That is why no one mentioned Professor Richard Musangi and Rev (Dr) John Mbiti. Do you remember the glory years when Kenya was a food basket, her agricultural extension model so famous that other African countries trooped here to study it? Well, we had those two distinguished scholars to thank. It’s just that we would rather hand out a shiny Elder of the Burning Spear to a violent, empty-headed politician but never to the men and women who toil and make a difference for this republic and her people.