Last week Baba Ijeoma was outside sweeping gutter water off his frontage like his life depended on it, It had rained hard the night before, and the whole street was muddy and a mess, His neighbor greeted him, half joking, "Baba, you are not going to rest today?"
He looked at her like she had just asked the sun why it bothers to rise, "Rest? If I don't sweep it, who will? The councilman? Please."
That line has a way of sticking with people, because everyone has their own version of that sentence they repeat to themselves it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it and it is worth asking whether that saying is genuine wisdom, or just a very polished excuse people use to avoid asking why the job is so tough in the first place.
Think about how often that phrase gets used, someone stays in a toxic job because "someone has to pay the bills." someone manages a difficult relationship because "someone has to keep the peace in this house." one woman call her Aunty Ngozi has used it for years to explain why she's always the one cooking for every single family function since 1998, "someone has to do it," she says, stirring a pot large enough to bathe a toddler in, sweat on her brow like she is negotiating with the stove itself.
Her niece asked her once, "Aunty, why does the someone always have to be you?"
Ngozi gave her the kind of side eye only a Nigerian aunty can give a look carrying three generations of unspoken judgment, "Because if I don't do it, who will? You?" then she laughed, not because it was funny or something, but because they both already knew her niece was not about to volunteer to do it.
That is just the thing, though, the phrase isn't wrong on its face, somebody genuinely has to do these tough jobs, somebody has to empty the bins at 5am so the rest of the estate people can wake up to something clean, somebody has to sit with a dying relative when nobody else can bear it, somebody has to be the manager who delivers bad news in a meeting nobody wants to attend, those jobs are real, and yes, someone has to carry them...
But the phrase turns dangerous the moment it stops being a description and starts being an identity... when "someone has to do it" quietly becomes "I always have to be that someone," that is when burnout then starts creeping in wearing something respectable, calling itself duty, convincing everyone around it including the person carrying it that this is simply how things are.
Femi, a hospital porter of fifteen years, put it well once, "Everybody claps for the doctor," he said, adjusting his badge, "but who carries the body after the doctor has pronounced someone dead? who cleans the theatre afterward? somebody has to do the work nobody wants to be photographed doing."
He was not complaining when he said it, if anything, he said it with a quiet kind of pride, and maybe that's the real difference worth paying attention to whether someone is doing the tough job because they chose it and it genuinely means something to them, or because somewhere along the line, nobody else stepped up, and they simply got stuck holding it.
There is also the question of what it would costs thosee people that keep saying yes, Aunty Ngozi's knees are not what they used to be, but the pot still finds its way to her kitchen every December time, Femi has missed more birthdays and weekends than he can count, all in service of work that keeps other peoples lives moving forward while his quietly waits its turn.....nobody forced them into these roles outright but somewhere between the first time they said yes and the hundredth, saying no stopped feeling like an option at all.
So yes, it is a tough job, and someone has to do it that much is not in question, what deserves far more attention is asking, honestly, why it keeps landing on the same shoulders again and again...... and whether someonehas quietly become a polite substitute for the person too responsible , too dependable, or too tired of arguing to say no....
Baba Ijeoma finished sweeping that morning ,he straightened his back, and he looked at his clean frontage with the kind of satisfaction only honest labor gives, that part, at least, makes sense.
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