I have watched villagers balance bundles of firewood on their heads, walking kilometers under a scorching sun from small hamlets into bigger towns to sell. By the time they arrive, exhaustion has already written itself on their faces. That is the moment some buyers move in, bargaining aggressively as if the seller’s fatigue is a discount line on the receipt. No one pauses to ask about a fair price. Objectivity dissolves into something that sounds noble in theory but collapses in practice.
The same script plays out in markets and offices across the country. Merchants wait for desperation to ripen before they make an offer on property, knowing that need bends resistance. Labour is priced at its lowest when a man’s options have run dry, and the transaction is dressed up as business acumen. It feels like someone’s pain becomes another’s grace, and that imbalance is called success. Yet the ethics we study in textbooks is that fairness, reciprocity, the golden rule of wanting for others what we want for ourselves. This tends to vanish the moment advantage is within reach.
This reflection came back sharply after reading Hadiza Bagudu’s piece, _Why Do We Try to Break Each Other? — The Hidden Cost of Aggressive Bargaining in Nigeria. She names a habit so quiet it feels normal: we don’t just want a discount, we want to win. And winning, too often, means breaking the person on the other side of the table. The negotiation starts with a price, then edges downward until profit evaporates and sometimes becomes loss. When the vendor finally yields, there is a quiet pride, as if something has been conquered. But what was actually won?
Economists call this zero-sum thinking, the belief that one person’s gain must come from another’s loss. Yet research on markets tells a different story. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued that markets function best when they rest on trust and mutual respect, not on the systematic erosion of the other party’s margin. In Nigeria’s case, the behavior creates a feedback loop. Vendors inflate prices preemptively to absorb the inevitable battering, so buyers feel clever paying ₦18,000 for an item that should have cost ₦12,000. Prices rise, trust erodes, and everyone ends up paying more for a system that feels heavier to live in.
Hadiza Bagudu frames the remedy through faith and conscience. In religious ethics, trade is not a battlefield but a covenant.
The pattern extends beyond markets. In offices, simple tasks stretch into weeks unless a bribe or shortcut appears. We call it hustle, but it is the same logic of squeezing advantage from another’s weakness. Psychologists studying social exchange find that relationships built on transactional gain decay faster than those built on fairness and goodwill. We say we value character, but our choices reveal a preference for what a person can add to our status or portfolio. Love, opportunity, and loyalty become priced commodities, and we wonder why connections feel brittle.
So the question lingers: must we take advantage of others to be lucky or prosperous? The evidence suggests otherwise. When wealth is built on the discomfort of others, it carries consequences that outlive the transaction. The person who cheated you years ago may have the money, but the settlement in their life often tells a different story. Life is already difficult for everyone. Choosing fairness does not make you naïve; it makes the system lighter, and lighter systems move. If we change this one habit of pricing with conscience instead of conquest can make trade, work, and even relationships begin to breathe again, she concluded.
Bagudu Mohammed
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
