The War on Excellence Reaches Ghana’s Classrooms.
The country’s brightest students are under attack—not from ignorance, but from intellectuals who’ve mistaken envy for equity.
Dr. Manaseh M. Mintah has declared war on Ghana’s National Science and Maths Quiz. In a recent essay, he dismissed it as “not science education; it is a performance.” In his view, the government’s GH¢9.5 million support for the 2025 edition is a waste of public funds—money that should instead go to “proper STEM education for all.”
It’s a familiar tune: the modern technocrat’s suspicion of excellence, cloaked in the rhetoric of equity. To Dr. Mintah, any program that produces visible winners must be inherently unjust, because not everyone can win.
He is not entirely wrong that Ghana’s education system is uneven. But his argument, shaped by the soft moralism of Western liberalism, veers into absurdity. He believes the quiz “privileges” students from elite boarding schools like Achimota and St. Peter’s—and that privilege itself is evil. His proposed solution? Strip taxpayer funding and rely on private alumni donors, lest the poor children of Adzakpakodzi Local Authority Day Secondary School feel left behind.
This logic collapses under its own sanctimony. The National Science and Maths Quiz does not create inequality; it exposes it. The inequities of Ghana’s schools are the product of state neglect and political vanity, not of bright students answering questions correctly on television. If Dr. Mintah seeks symbols of inequity, he should look no further than the motorcades of politicians in their taxpayer-funded V8 Land Cruisers, sirens blaring as they splash mud on the very citizens they claim to serve.
I am not an uncritical defender of the quiz. But of all the ways Ghana squanders its billions—from galamsey cartels to cocoa graft, from salt concessions sold to cronies to the four billion U.S. dollars in annual remittances that vanish into thin air—a modest GH¢9.5 million spent on a national science competition is hardly the country’s gravest sin. The government has yet to build a world-class hospital or even a reliable highway, yet somehow the quiz show is the source of inequality? Spare us the moral theater.
Dr. Mintah’s essay even slips into a familiar relativist trope. He laments that rural students must translate scientific terms from Ewe, Twi, or Dagbani into English, “losing precious seconds and confidence.” Into what language, then, do Ewe or Twi students at Mfantsipim translate—Latin? The problem, if language plays any role, cuts across the board; the problem, however, is competence. And the cure for mediocrity is not dismantling competition but raising standards across the board.
Around the world, nations invest heavily in identifying and training their brightest minds. They do not apologize for success—they cultivate it. The point of education is not to make everyone equal in outcome, but to make opportunity available and excellence aspirational. Yet the liberal impulse, everywhere it takes hold, mistakes equality for sameness and merit for oppression. It teaches envy, not effort; grievance, not grit.
Dr. Mintah writes that “somewhere in a rural classroom, there is a student who does not know how to beat a buzzer but, given the chance, could build one.” A charming line—but unserious. What prevents that student from building anything is not a televised quiz; it is the rot of political mismanagement, the corruption of the education ministry, and the ideological confusion of intellectuals who despise competition yet worship merit on paper.
It is telling, too, that many of the same voices who cheer taxpayer-funded school feeding programs rail against taxpayer-funded science competitions. Feeding children is noble; feeding their minds is elitist. This is the intellectual incoherence of modern progressivism: every excellence is suspect, every hierarchy offensive, every distinction oppressive.
The National Science and Maths Quiz may not be perfect, but it celebrates something Ghana desperately needs—discipline, knowledge, aspiration. It gives young people a reason to compete, to study, to think rigorously, to win honorably. It builds intellectual ambition where the state builds dependency.
The left’s obsession with flattening every difference has led to a cultural war against merit itself. But nations are not built on sameness. They are built on talent, courage, and competition—the willingness to rise, and to celebrate those who do.
So yes, fund the laboratories. Build the robotics centers. Improve the rural classrooms. But fund the quiz, too. We can do both. The argument that we must choose is not only false—it is defeatist.
The National Science and Maths Quiz is not a “performance.” It is a promise: that Ghana can still produce minds sharp enough to rise above mediocrity. And if that offends the apostles of sameness, so be it. Excellence, after all, is always offensive to those who fear it.
