Every year around September, something strange happens across Ghana. Living rooms fall silent.
WhatsApp groups explode with commentary. Grown adults who cannot remember their own school timetables suddenly become experts in organic chemistry and calculus.
This is the power of the National Science and Maths Quiz, a competition that has quietly become one of the most watched programmes in the country.
This year’s edition is bigger than most. A total of 174 senior high schools are competing, made up of 107 regional qualifiers, 27 seeded schools, five private schools and 36 top performing runners up.
The national championship is returning to the University of Cape Coast, the spiritual home of the contest since it first began in 1993. Prempeh College took the very first trophy.
More than three decades later, the rivalry between the old giants and the hungry newcomers still pulls in millions of viewers.
But NSMQ has never really been just about a trophy. It has become a mirror that Ghana holds up to itself, and what it reflects is complicated.
On one hand, the quiz genuinely celebrates brilliance. It gives ordinary teenagers from small towns a national stage most adults never get.
Watching a student from a school many people have never heard of solve a problem faster than a favourite from Accra or Kumasi is one of the purest joys on Ghanaian television. It is also good for the country.
A show that makes science and maths look exciting to teenagers is doing quiet, important work in a nation that badly needs more engineers, doctors and researchers.
On the other hand, the drama that sometimes erupts on stage says something else entirely about how high the stakes have become.
This year’s one eighth stage contest at the CNC Auditorium turned tense when Anlo SHS and Kumasi High School walked off in protest, accusing the organisers of giving St Augustine’s College an unfair advantage in scoring.
The disagreement began over a single question about the meninges and snowballed from there. The quiz mistress eventually declared Augusco the winner without the final Riddles round being played.
Alumni groups, parents and old students flooded social media for days, some defending their schools with a passion usually reserved for football derbies.
For many Ghanaian families, academic performance is treated as the clearest, most respectable route out of hardship.
A win at NSMQ does not just bring bragging rights. It brings scholarships, media attention, and a kind of local celebrity that can follow a student for years.
Old students’ associations pour resources into coaching their alma maters because the school’s reputation, and by extension their own, is tied to how far the team goes.
This obsession has a cost, though. Students preparing for NSMQ often spend months in grueling drills that leave little room for anything else.
Critics argue the competition, for all its brilliance, narrows the definition of a smart Ghanaian child to someone who can recall facts quickly under pressure, sidelining the creative thinkers, the artists and the tinkerers who do not fit that mould.
There is also the quieter question of what happens to the hundreds of schools that never make it past the early rounds, and whether the spotlight on a handful of elite institutions widens the gap between the well-resourced and the under resourced.
Still, it is hard to watch a room full of teenagers erupt in joy after solving a problem live on national television and not feel that Ghana is doing something right.
NSMQ endures because it taps into something deeply Ghanaian, the belief that knowledge is a form of dignity, and that a bright child from anywhere can stand toe to toe with the best in the country.
Whatever happens when the grand finale is played out this year, one thing is certain.
Long after the trophy is handed over, the country will still be arguing about what NSMQ really means, and that argument, messy as it is, might be the most honest reflection of Ghana’s relationship with excellence.
SOURCE: ApurumManasseh Wintemah Apurum
