By Charles Obiajulu Ugwu
Every morning, long before the first bus leaves the depot, the contest begins. The trader opening her stall glances at the woman two stalls down and measures the height of her stock. The young graduate scrolls past a classmate’s new car and feels something tighten in his chest. The pastor counts the chairs and wonders how many filled the church across the road. The civil servant opens the promotion list and searches first for his rival’s name, and only then for his own.
Nobody calls it war. We call it ambition, hustle, getting ahead, making it. We have lived inside it so long that it no longer looks like anything at all. It looks like life.
But it was built. Somebody built it, somebody taught it to us, and for most of us the first lesson came in a classroom with numbered desks and a list pinned to the wall at the end of term.
This is about a boy who noticed.
An ordinary question
It was the kind of visit that fills a school calendar and that nobody remembers a week later. A supervisor from outside, a walk along the corridors, a word with the head teacher, a few more with the pupils. Somewhere in that afternoon she stopped beside a boy, an ordinary schoolboy, and asked the sort of question adults ask children to be kind, not because they expect an answer.
“So, what troubles you most these days?”
She was ready for the usual replies. Exams. A friend who had fallen out with him. Too much homework. A lost match. The small storms of childhood that adults smile at and forget.
He did not answer at once, and he did not answer out loud. He reached for a plain sheet of paper, the kind lying on every desk in every school, and began to write. Quickly. Nothing crossed out. As though the list had been sitting inside him for months, waiting for a grown-up who would ask.
- The people closest to me in marks feel like my worst enemies. When they win, I lose.
- We are taught to work together and help each other. Then we are tested in a way that makes us beat each other. Which one are we supposed to believe?
- Everything is either/or. Never “and”. It makes life feel small and already decided, when there are infinite frontiers out there I am not allowed to explore.
- Everyone can see the system is not working, but nobody changes it. That looks like comfort, not wisdom.
- My future is being squeezed into a shape too small for me. It will cut off parts of me before I even find out what they are.
- Most grown-ups disagree with all this when they talk about it, but they go along with it anyway. That feels selfish. Sometimes it feels cowardly.
The defence that gave way
She read it twice. Then she did what any of us would do. She reached for the defence. There are reasons the system works this way, she told herself. Universities need some way to choose. Employers need signals. Standards must be kept. A child cannot see the whole picture.
And somewhere in the middle of that defence, the ground gave way beneath it. Every reason she reached for turned out to be one of his six lines, spoken in a grown-up voice. She was not answering him. She was agreeing with him, politely. What followed was not anger. It was closer to grief: guilt for what her generation had accepted, sorrow for what it had handed on without so much as a protest.
I know that grief. I spent more than a decade inside a professional institute whose work, in part, was deciding who qualified and who did not. You believe in the standard because you must; you could not do the work otherwise. But now and again a result, a candidate, a quiet failure that should never have been a failure, forces you to look at the instrument instead of the person it measures. The look rarely lasts. The next cycle begins. That is how systems survive. Not by winning arguments, but by keeping everyone too busy to finish them.
Here is the claim I want to make. The boy was not describing a school. He was describing us. The classroom is only where the pattern is first installed. Every line on his sheet has an adult version, running at full scale, in our markets and our homes, our churches and mosques, our elections, and the quiet values we pass across the dinner table.
The market: when the neighbour becomes the threat
Start with money, because that is where the boy’s first line goes when it grows up.
The economist Fred Hirsch described a class of goods whose whole value lies in having more of them than the next person. He called them positional. A first-class degree is one. So is the best address in town, the top slot in a ranking, the corner office. By design, not everyone can have them. And when enough of life is organised around positional goods, every neighbour becomes a threat, because every gain beside you registers as a loss to you.
Walk through any market in Lagos or Onitsha and you can watch the logic at work. Ten traders on one street, selling the same goods, each watching the others’ customers. Together they could buy in bulk and pay less, share a warehouse, protect each other in a bad season. A few do, and they prosper. Most do not, because each of them learned long ago that the person nearest you is the one most able to take what is yours. Scale that up and you get firms that would rather crush a rival than grow a market, and nations that read a neighbour’s prosperity as a wound at home.
Yet the things that make people truly rich do not behave this way. Knowledge shared is not knowledge halved. A skill taught is not a skill lost. Trust built between two traders makes both of them stronger. The scarcity the boy felt at his desk is, across most of economic life, a scarcity we manufactured and then forgot we had made.
The home: the sermon and the ledger
His second line is the sharpest, because it catches us in a contradiction we have stopped seeing. We teach children to share, and then we grade them on beating each other. Philip Jackson, writing about classrooms in the late 1960s, called this the hidden curriculum: what an institution actually teaches through the way it is arranged, as opposed to what it claims to teach. The poster on the wall says teamwork. The examination hall says sit apart, cover your paper, help no one. Children believe the hall.
So do adults. We simply have better manners about it. The family preaches love and then compares: why can’t you be like your cousin, the one who is now a doctor? The community preaches togetherness and seats the biggest donor at the high table. The company frames “one team” on the reception wall and runs a forced ranking at the end of the year. The phone in your pocket counts your friends, your likes, your followers, and tells you every hour exactly where you stand. Everywhere the sermon says one thing and the ledger says another. Everywhere we learn, without being told, to obey the ledger and quote the sermon.
The altar: where “and” was lost
I write this as a man of faith, which is why it costs something to write it. The boy’s third line, that life has been reduced to either/or with no room for “and”, reaches all the way into our places of worship.
Faith at its best is the most generous “and” human beings have ever imagined: the last and the first, the poor and the blessed, the stranger and the brother. Yet look at how much of our religious life has been rearranged as a contest. Congregations measured by the size of the crowd and the cost of the building. Blessing proven by having more than the neighbour, so that the man who prospers is assumed to be favoured and the man who struggles is suspected of hidden sin. Denominations that compete for members like rival franchises. The house of God, sorted into winners and the rest.
The Igbo say that wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it. Chinua Achebe returned to that proverb again and again, because it refuses to let any single truth stand alone and unchallenged. It is a philosophy of “and”, older than most of the institutions that have since forgotten it. The boy has probably never heard it. He arrived at it anyway, from the hard end, by feeling what its absence does to a life.
The state: who guards the gate
Politics is where either/or becomes law. Winner takes all. One ward against another, one zone against the next, one people’s turn against everyone else’s. In too many places an election is not a choice about direction. It is a fight over whose turn it is to eat, and every victory is measured by who was shut out.
The boy’s fourth line asks why a failing system will not change. In politics the answer is uncomfortable and simple. The people with the power to change the rules are the people the rules elected. The constitution that made them, the party machine that carried them, the electoral map that favours them: to reform any of it is to saw at the branch they sit on. So reform is promised in every campaign and shelved in every term. Inertia is not an absence of force. It has a constituency, and it votes.
The same holds in the school, the corporation and the professional body. Those who run an examination were, almost always, the ones who passed it. To question it seriously is to question the story of their own rise, and very few people volunteer for that. What looks like stubbornness is usually loyalty: loyalty to the ladder that carried you up, felt as loyalty to standards.
The self: what never gets recorded
His fifth line is the most personal on the page, and I think it is the heaviest charge of all. His future, he wrote, is being squeezed into a shape too small for him.
We call it development. Much of it is subtraction. At eleven, at fourteen, at sixteen, labels arrive with a confidence the evidence rarely earns. Not academic. Not a science child. Not leadership material. Each one closes a door, and behind every door is a capacity that will probably never meet the moment it was made for. The adult world simply carries on the work with other tools: job titles, credit scores, the wrong accent, the wrong surname, the wrong postcode.
Nobody keeps count of this loss. We publish unemployment, inflation and casualty figures. Nobody publishes the number of engineers told at twelve that they were poor at mathematics, the leaders taught early that speaking out of turn gets you punished, the artists persuaded that art is not serious work. A nation can be quietly bankrupted this way without one line on its balance sheet. You cannot miss what was never allowed to exist.
Underneath all of it lies a shift in what we value. The pattern carries the name of the economist Charles Goodhart, though its sharpest phrasing came later from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. We wanted educated people, so we counted grades; then we wanted grades.
We wanted prosperity, so we counted output; then we chased output and spent the soil it grew in. We wanted good leaders, so we created ranks; then we fought over the ranks and forgot to lead. We wanted holiness, so we counted heads. Each time, the instrument we built to serve a good ended up being served by us.
The sign in the window
Which brings us to his last line, the one I suspect undid the supervisor. Most grown-ups, he wrote, disagree with all this in private and go along with it in public. That struck him as selfish, and sometimes as cowardly.
It is a hard thing to hear from a child, mostly because it is true.
Václav Havel, writing in communist Czechoslovakia, described a greengrocer who places a political slogan in his shop window, among the onions and carrots. He does not believe the slogan. Nobody walking past believes it either. But everyone puts something in the window, and so the system stands, held up not by conviction but by a thousand small acts of going along. The lie, Havel saw, depends on the cooperation of people who know it is a lie.
Most of us have a sign in our window. We condemn exam culture at dinner and pay a private tutor to help our children beat it. We denounce corruption and then call a cousin in the ministry. We mourn the politics of tribe and then ask, quietly, where the candidate comes from. We preach humility and dress for the front pew. We defend the system in committee, because in committee there is something to lose. The boy has seen through every one of these windows. What he cannot work out is why the adults keep the signs up. Fear of being first is the honest answer. Convenience is the common one.
What the boy is really asking
Read his six lines once more and notice what he does not ask for. He does not ask to be spared effort. He does not say excellence is a lie, or that everyone deserves a prize. He is asking for something far harder: an excellence that does not need a loser. A way of striving in which my rise does not require your fall, because the things most worth having, understanding, skill, trust, meaning, are not scarce. They only look scarce because we have arranged them on a ladder.
James Carse once distinguished games played to be won, which must therefore end, from games played so that the play can go on. We have taken a creature made for the second kind and enrolled it, from the age of five, in the first.
So the real question on that sheet is not about assessment at all. It is about purpose. What are human beings for? If the answer is to win, then the system works perfectly and the boy is a sore loser in training. But if we are here to grow, to make, to tend, to leave the world more fertile than we found it, then we have built almost everything backwards.
We would want markets that reward cooperation as well as rivalry. Communities that honour the helper as highly as the spender. Faith that measures itself by the poor it lifts rather than the crowd it draws. Politics that asks what we can build together rather than whose turn it is. Schools that count how far each child has grown, not how many others she has passed.
Our grandparents who farmed understood this without any theory. A good season was not the one in which you harvested more than your neighbour. It was the one that left the land richer for the year that followed. We are cultivators who have been trained to behave like combatants. Training can be undone.
I do not know what the supervisor did with that sheet. Perhaps she folded it into a drawer, as so many of us folded our own doubts when we were young enough to have them. Perhaps she carried it into the next meeting, where someone said, as someone always does, that this is simply how things are done. I hope it was the second. I am honest enough to suspect it was the first.
But somewhere a boy has written down, in a few unhurried minutes, what the rest of us spent our lives learning not to say. Every system that now looks permanent was once a decision, and decisions can be taken again. He knows it. We know it. The only question left is the one he was too polite to add at the bottom of his list: what exactly are you waiting for?
Charles is a contrarian thinker writing from Lagos
