Kenyans should start relearning to celebrate small wins

American actor Tracy Jamal Morgan said, “bad news travels at the speed of light; good news travels like molasses.” He might as well have been talking about Kenya. Bad news makes headlines every day while the nation is rather parsimonious in its sharing of great stories.

In recent years, Kenyans have been fed on a steady diet of defeatism. From failures of the economy, regional exclusion in public appointments to perceptions of femicide, it would seem, to borrow former US vice president Agnew Spiro’s words, the “nattering nabobs of negativism” have been on overdrive.

But as Irish novelist Frank Delaney put it, “there is always good news wrapped in bad news.” Take for instance the Social Health Insurance Fund (SHIF). Much has been said about it, mostly in unflattering terms.

Yet positive stories abound where SHIF is working. A social-media die-hard critic of the government confessed to being pleasantly surprised recently. His cousin suffered debilitating injuries in a road accident. SHIF stepped in and paid for his emergency surgery.

A friend whose wife suffers from a chronic disease says SHIF has taken over payment of the expensive transfusions needed to keep her alive. These are not just saccharine sentiments but real-life stories that hardly get told. Further, Social Health Authority, SHIF and constituent functions, when properly operationalised, align with universal health coverage and sustainable development goals' aspirations far better than the defunct NHIF ever could.

We run the risk of becoming a nation of perpetual whingers. This is not to say we should bury our heads in the sand when problems arise. Nor should we discount the lived experiences of others in pretended rosiness. What we can, and should do, is celebrate relatively minor successes but that count towards more meaningful victories over the nation’s shared adversities.

A case in point is the upgrade of Kenya’s credit outlook. Rating agency Moody’s has changed the country’s outlook from negative to positive. Whilst this does not necessarily mean Kenya has surmounted all her public debt challenges, the sapient view would be to see it as Moody’s does; “a reflection of improvements in debt affordability and a reduced likelihood of liquidity risks by Kenya.” This is arguably the first external confirmation that the country’s fiscal consolidation efforts are beginning to pay off.

In all fairness, Kenyans are not natural complainers. They are stoic people whose reliance has seen them overcome past difficult economic times. However, in this age of information and disinformation, it is the ubiquity of deliberately misconstrued narratives for self-serving political expediency that carry the day. There is talk of Central Kenya being isolated from national leadership even when reality shows the region to enjoy a large share of public appointments and functions of government.

There are also deliberate attempts to feed into ethnically charged stereotypes that attribute national failures to incompetence on the part of some communities. Yet brilliance is not an ethnically shared attribute. Nor is incompetence a function of tribe. These are individual traits that define personalities rather than entire communities. Perhaps what is needed is the zeitgeist of the '60s and '70s when political and ethnic fissures were non-existent and where every small win was a national triumph.