The Reluctant Leader: Escaping the burden of leadership
Ever noticed how life has a funny way of throwing responsibilities at you when you least want them? You know, like when your African mother asks you to sweep the veranda, and suddenly you’re in charge of cleaning the entire house because “since you already have the broom in your hand”? Well, that’s exactly what happened to me in secondary school, except instead of holding a broom, they handed me an entire classroom’s worth of responsibilities.
I shared this story with my contacts through WhatsApp status last Friday evening, after wrapping up a productive work week. As I reflected on leadership and initiative-taking, memories of my reluctant journey into leadership came flooding back. The response was overwhelming — turns out many could relate to it. So, I decided to share the full story here with all the details I can still remember.
Picture this: Young me, around the age of 12–13, fresh out of primary school, probably in my oversized shirt and trousers (because “you’ll grow into it”), walking into Wadata Day Secondary School Bida, Niger State. As a JSS1 student with just one goal — to mind my own business. Spoiler alert: The universe had other plans.
When I started JSS1, I guess because I was academically inclined, Mr. Peter, our class form master, and my classmates decided I should be the class representative. I tried to decline — really, I did — but they treated my objections like they were nothing. I had no choice; I had to get to work.
In government secondary schools back then, being a class representative wasn’t just a fancy title to put on your nonexistent LinkedIn profile. Oh no. You were basically a mini-administrator, teacher’s personal assistant, and designated scapegoat all rolled into one unfortunate package.
My daily routine? The list was endless. It included creating sweeping roster (that nobody followed), maintaining the blackboard, marking the register (attendance) on days when the form master couldn’t show up to class, writing teachers’ notes on the board for my classmates to copy in their notebooks, and fetching teachers from the staff room. And when there was no teacher around? I was supposed to maintain order in a class full of teenagers. You can imagine how hard that would be, being a teenager myself.
But wait, it gets even crazier. The senior prefects? They treated the class representative like their personal stress ball. Whenever they stormed into our noisy classroom — and trust me, our class was always noisy — I’d get an automatic serving of 5–10 strokes of the cane. No trial, no jury, just execution. Talk about quick justice!
These responsibilities and more, I bore against my will till we completed JSS1, but as JSS2 approached, I decided I’d had enough and wasn’t going to continue. Upon resumption, I announced to my classmates and friends that I was no longer interested and that they’d have to appoint someone else for the role.
That threat didn’t seem to do much. While my friends supported me, the rest of the class wasn’t having it. They were always eager to shout, “Adekunle!” whenever a teacher or prefect came into the class asking who the class rep was.
It started to feel like a cult; easy to enter, but hard to exit, so I had to act. Whenever they screamed my name in response to that famous question, I’d immediately object and tell the teacher or prefect, “That was in JSS1; I’m not the class rep for JSS2.”
All this was happening while I still reluctantly performed class rep duties since there was no replacement yet.
The situation reached its peak when our Business Studies teacher (I can’t quite remember her name) entered the class one day, asking the popular question. The usual chorus of my name rang out, and I made my standard objection. Her response? “The former class rep must continue!” I was furious, but in my head, I stood my ground.
Shortly after she left, a prefect (or teacher — I can’t remember, to be honest) came into the class, and the same scene played out. Unknown to me, our Business Studies teacher hadn’t gone far and overheard everything. She came back into the class and gave me a memorable punishment. But even that couldn’t break my resolve. It was nothing; I’d been through worse from my grandmother.
I can’t remember exactly how it ended, but I think we got a new form master, and I finally succeeded in renouncing the class rep title. The new form master appointed someone else after realizing that my mind was already made up. And that’s how I succeeded in passing the baton to a classmate named Abdulrauf. (Interestingly, writing this now, I realize I haven’t heard from him since we completed JSS3. I hope he’s doing well wherever he is now.)
In SS1, something similar played out. I was appointed the general class rep a few days after resumption when we were all still in a combined class before we got divided into science, art, and commercial.
At one point, the art students went to their class, as they were beginning to resume in their numbers. Now remaining were science and commercial students in the class. My saving grace was that I was not initially a science student (I was initially commercial but switched back to science after several weeks). So it was very easy for me to avoid it. By the time I returned to science class, there was already a class rep.
Looking back now, I recognize that my stubborn rejection of these leadership roles was shortsighted and born out of ignorance. Those responsibilities were meant to be stepping stones in my journey from boyhood to maturity. While I unknowingly developed some leadership skills during my tenure in JSS1 and the brief period in JSS2 and SS1, I now understand that embracing these roles could have taught me invaluable lessons in people management, effective communication, empathy, resilience, and lots more.
But that’s the beauty of life’s journey — every experience, even the ones we resist, shapes who we become. While I may not have fully appreciated these leadership opportunities then, they’ve become meaningful lessons that I carry with me today. Sometimes, the responsibilities we’re most reluctant to accept are precisely the ones that help us grow the most.
