The Real Honour Is Service, Not Paid Recognition

Early this month, I received a letter from an organisation styling itself as the “Ghana Ministers of State Excellence Honours.” The letter informed me that I had been adjudged “Best CEO of the Year” and invited me to receive the award at an event scheduled to take place at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel.

Ordinarily, recognition for public service should be a matter of humility, gratitude and sober reflection. No serious public officer should be indifferent to appreciation where such appreciation is grounded in transparent assessment, demonstrable performance, public impact and institutional credibility. However, public recognition must never be reduced to a transaction in which the recipient first pays for the honour before being celebrated.

In this particular case, I did not know which year the award covered. I did not know the criteria used for the assessment. I did not know the composition of the assessment panel. I did not know the indicators against which performance was measured. I did not know who the other contenders were. I did not know whether any independent verification had been conducted. Above all, I did not consider myself the “Best CEO,” because in public service there is always much more work to be done, many more lives to touch, and many more institutional reforms to pursue.

Out of caution, I advised my staff to contact the organisers and seek clarity. It was only then that we discovered that attendance at the event to receive the supposed honour was tied to payment. The options communicated were either a sponsorship package of GH¢50,000 or the purchase of a dinner table of eight at GH¢25,000. In other words, the path to public recognition appeared to have been tied to financial contribution.

I opted not to be part of it.

This experience raises a serious matter of public interest. If an award is credible, it must rest on merit, evidence and transparent evaluation. If a person has genuinely been adjudged deserving of recognition, that recognition should not depend on whether the person, the person’s institution, or the public office they occupy can pay for sponsorship or buy a dinner table. Once payment becomes the condition for visibility, attendance or receipt of honour, the exercise risks losing its moral authority. It begins to look less like an award and more like a pay-to-be-recognised arrangement.

This is why public appointees must be extremely careful.

At a time when Ghana is working to reset the country, rebuild public trust, restore discipline in public administration and redirect national resources toward the welfare of citizens, state resources must not be diverted into needless ceremonies of personal glorification. Public funds are not meant to purchase applause. They are not meant to finance vanity. They are not meant to manufacture prestige for office holders. Every cedi entrusted to a public institution must be treated as a sacred public resource, to be applied only in ways that advance the mandate of that institution and improve the lives of the Ghanaian people.

Awards are not wrong in themselves. Genuine recognition can encourage excellence, inspire institutional discipline and celebrate public-spirited leadership. But recognition becomes problematic when it lacks transparency, when its criteria are unclear, when its organisers are unknown to the wider public, when its assessment process is invisible, and when honourees are expected to pay substantial sums before they can be publicly celebrated. Such schemes exploit the human desire for validation. They prey on the appetite for titles, plaques, citations and ceremonial attention. They create the illusion of excellence without necessarily proving excellence.

For public officials, this danger is even greater. An appointee does not hold office for personal decoration. An appointee holds office as a trustee of the people’s confidence. The true measure of public leadership is not the number of plaques on one’s wall, but the quality of reforms one advances, the discipline one brings to public institutions, the problems one helps to solve, and the relief one brings to ordinary citizens.

Ghana does not need leaders chasing ceremonial recognition while citizens continue to demand jobs, better services, accountable institutions, functioning public enterprises, improved healthcare, quality education, reliable infrastructure and honest stewardship of national resources. The country does not need public officers spending institutional funds on tables at award dinners while the same institutions complain of inadequate resources to perform their core mandates. The country does not need a culture in which officials are encouraged to mistake paid visibility for public achievement.

The current national moment requires sobriety. It requires discipline. It requires modesty. It requires a renewed ethic of service. It requires appointees who understand that the public office they occupy is not a platform for self-promotion, but an opportunity to contribute to national recovery and transformation.

The actual and fulfilling award lies elsewhere.

The real award is not a plaque handed over at a hotel ceremony. The real award is a public institution that works better because of one’s leadership. The real award is a citizen who receives a service more efficiently than before. The real award is a young person who gains opportunity because government has functioned properly. The real award is a public enterprise that becomes more accountable, more productive and more responsive to national development. The real award is the confidence of citizens who can say, not because they were told by an event organiser, but because they have felt it in their lives, that public leadership is beginning to serve them better.

For those of us privileged to serve in this administration, the greatest honour must be the successful delivery of the reset agenda. That agenda is not about personal titles. It is not about ceremonial grandeur. It is not about collecting awards whose basis is unclear. It is about restoring integrity to governance, reviving institutions, strengthening accountability, improving public service delivery, protecting the public purse, creating opportunities and lifting the living conditions of Ghanaians.

I therefore urge all public appointees, heads of institutions and public servants to be cautious of award schemes that require payment, sponsorship or table purchases as a pathway to recognition. Before any public institution associates itself with such programmes, it must ask basic questions: What is the credibility of the organiser? What is the assessment methodology? Who were the nominees? Who sat on the selection panel? What evidence was examined? What year or period does the award cover? Is payment a condition for participation? Will public funds be used, directly or indirectly, to support the event?

Where these questions cannot be answered satisfactorily, the prudent course is to decline.

Public service must be protected from the creeping culture of purchased prestige. Ghanaian citizens deserve leaders who are focused on delivery, not decoration; on reform, not recognition; on service, not self-celebration. The temptation to buy visibility must give way to the discipline of producing results.

History will not remember us for the number of awards we collected. It will remember us for whether we used the opportunity of office to make Ghana better.

That is the only honour worth pursuing.

Prof. Michael Kpessa-Whyte
Director-General, State Interests and Governance Authority [SIGA]