I became smarter from the intellectual rigor displayed in this article. How can we bring this rigor to everyday people outside of the iron gates of privileged tech? How can this be part of the whole that would stoke a cultural revolution in Nigeria (even if I don't believe in that geographic expression)?
I quite agree with your summation and the role leadership plays in coordination, especially in creating a focal point to build from.
I will add that leadership doesn't have to be political. One of the main problems we have is that people don't see that they have duties to play in enjoying the rights we desire.
Part of that duty is an interest in the society's success, even against your preferred leadership of it.
A situation where, because your preferred leadership is not in power, you do not see anything done as a possible step in the right direction makes it very hard for any leader to make a significant impact in our context.
Development is hard work. It involves pain, sacrifices, and time to fruition. A situation where a leader has only four years (a short time), and anyone not in a seat can promise easy solutions to complex problems to take over power, will keep us in a rut where the vast majority believe that the leaders are the only problem.
Yes, we need leadership. But more inclusive leadership from every group that puts society first, irrespective of who is in charge. An idea diffuses fastest where there is similarity.
I think we need more personal responsibility right now. Perhaps with more leaders in their groups accepting their parts to play, we can build a real consensus that holds political leaders accountable as they create the needed focal points to build from.
I'm wont to agree with you because you speak to the teenage/early-to-mid twenties me. But the me of today know that elites may die due to old age but their spawns remain both physically and in abstraction. If by "transient" you meant leaving office, what happens when they do? They get recycled with themselves or one of their spawns who doesn't necessarily have to be biologically related.
Not only that, the ideas they perpetuate (what I meant by "in abstraction") in words and in deed, are even harder to dislodge because human brains have a thing for low-quality info. Not an indictment, it's just easier to process and biology likes to follow the path of least resistance.
It is one of the reasons I like this publication so much because they're doing part of the hard work we have to do for this country in terms of ideas competition. The job for you and I is to first outcompete the bad ideas with good ones. That's the extent to which I agree with you on "work" and "transient".
Bad ideas won't die, but we can tip the odds to favour good ideas such that when political entrepreneurs are shopping around for ideas, the goods one are likely to pop up, say to a 4:1 ratio in favour of good ideas. I'll even take 3:2 as long as good ideas get the edge.
Good ideas are not the end in and of themselves, they're the starting point. There's still the work of sorting which of the good ideas work where and when and the hard work of evaluating and iterating that.
I call these things hard work because apart from the core intellectual problems we need to solve, at the leadership and political level, the money you'll use to do all these nice things (in our own eyes) will come from somewhere. So there's also the political problem. The leader is still going to figure out how to get the buy-in of his colleagues, most likely with opposing interest and equal stakes, who think the money will be better off doing other things, and tell them why this is the best choice. So, nothing can be taken for granted. Other intermediaries will have to emerge to complement 1914 Reader with the facts and intellectual honesty needed to create a possible future many people can lean into.
Understanding these issues and the layers in which they present themselves is what makes stark your position that the lure of "easy solutions to complex problems" is a scam. But guess what? Scammy narratives are easy for the brain to process hence attractive.
I share your passion for development. I have complained only about leaders in the past, but over time, my perspective has changed.
When I started in business, Yar'Adua was in power, then Jonathan came, after him Buhari, and finally Tinubu.
Our clients have mostly been government organizations, so I had the good fortune to interact with civil servants, politicians, and the broader citizenry across Nigeria's regions as we executed projects.
Regardless of who is in power or who is drafted to lead an MDA, civil servants continue their work as usual. You will quickly notice nothing changes. Everyone just complains about the "government."
You are then in villages, towns, and cities across the entire country to execute projects as contracted by the government and such people's representatives. The people don't want to work; they expect handouts. They are not interested in your training and want only the empowerment component, especially the cash component. They also complain about the "government."
You make friends with MDA chief executives and politicians, and you see the immense pressure on them from their constituents. They want handouts, unmerited employment, and underserved contracts without due process, and they want them now. For them, "na our turn".
You see that if you stand against their wishes and try to tell them the right thing, you are quickly hated. You become a wicked man/woman, and your chances of coming back come to zero.
You see the same communities celebrate very rich civil servants, security personnel, politicians, and those with questionable wealth. Honest, hardworking people are despised. They ask them: 'are you not doing the same job?"
You look at those friends in positions and your own experiences, and start asking yourself: if I were in this person's shoes, what would I do differently?
You research how other countries developed and how we humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to living in small groups, city-states, and today's nation-states. Time and time again, you see that having shared intentions and the division of labour is at the heart of it. Leaders are there to coordinate, as the piece succinctly said. But the work itself that needs coordination is done by the people.
I think we need a lot more personal responsibility, as outlined in my earlier comment. We need more opinion leaders to drive self-awareness of our responsibilities as citizens, as much as we hold leaders accountable.
I love your response so much. And I think it's easy to get frustrated with Nigerians and our culture of entitlement, but that's the entire point of this article about coordination.
Let's start with this:
"When I started in business, Yar'Adua was in power, then Jonathan came, after him Buhari, and finally Tinubu."
If you look at the economic indices of the country from the time you started business to now, you'll find that the lot of the average Nigerian has gotten worse. This is not due to their individual failings, it is due to government policies that have consistently failed the people and robbed them of a decent life.
Two:
"Regardless of who is in power or who is drafted to lead an MDA, civil servants continue their work as usual. You will quickly notice nothing changes. Everyone just complains about the "government.""
Civil servants continue their work as usual because every civil servant knows that no individual civil servant can do anything about the status quo and act accordingly around those expectations. When Bolaji Abdullah was Minister of Sports, the National Sports Commission was a different place because he coordinated the staff around the issues he wanted to address. And they rose to the occasion. When someone new comes, they'll simply adjust to the new person's expectations. Or at worst, revert to their steady state, whatever that is.
But that was Abdullah, a small cog. He was minister for months (or maybe years, I dont remember) without meeting the person who appointed him. Neither was he handed a mandate. What can an individual civil servant do here? Or the individual head of an MDA when even they have no focal point? Everybody just goes with their church mind, which will most likely correlate with their narrow interest or folk intuition of what's best. It then becomes a prisoner's dilemma where the pull to defect becomes strong and everyone is worse off.
So a coordination game with no Shelling point becomes a prisoner's dilemma.
Three:
"You are then in villages, towns, and cities across the entire country to execute projects as contracted by the government and such people's representatives. The people don't want to work; they expect handouts. They are not interested in your training and want only the empowerment component, especially the cash component. They also complain about the "government."
You make friends with MDA chief executives and politicians, and you see the immense pressure on them from their constituents. They want handouts, unmerited employment, and underserved contracts without due process, and they want them now. For them, "na our turn" [...]"
People migrate to cities to find opportunities to better their lives. Do our cities fulfil that goal? Our cities are poverty traps. There's a saying that "cities are labour market." I'm not even sure the Lagos State Government or the Kano State Government or Rivers State understands what that means, let's not even mention the Federal Government.
The Federal Government of Nigeria as far as I can tell since the time of Jonathan has been on the trajectory of regressive policies around trade. And the consequences have been the loss of jobs. On a massive scale. Fifty per cent of Nigeria's GDP was wiped off in the eight years of Buhari. Yet, they keep putting more people on the government's payroll. They take your private jobs and(or) your ability to create one for yourself and promise to take care of you. I'm not surprised people act accordingly.
To go back to the point you made here:
"A situation where a leader has only four years (a short time), and anyone not in a seat can promise easy solutions to complex problems to take over power, will keep us in a rut where the vast majority believe that the leaders are the only problem."
The equilibrium we've found ourselves is that, with God on their side, everyone thinks they can be "there" someday. This belief is what you hear every day, everywhere, reinforced by people and institutions of high status. This is how the ideas "in the air" gets into people's heads and become their lived reality. I'll like you to read this article by Malcolm Gladwell.(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air).
This phenomenon of ideas as a free-floating rationale to use Dan Denntt's term is why, in my opinion, there's a multimillion-dollar PR industry, while on the other hand, some just straight up censor people. Those with power achieve censorship, those with money do PR. I apologise for the digression.
The essential point I'm making here is that the centralised constitution of our government, as bestowed upon us by the military, is achieving its goal whether desired or not. To respond to your quote "na our turn", It's literally their turn. Hello, rotational presidency?! Hello, federal character?! Only that that "turn" is for a selected few. But it gets as close as it gets to people if whoever is of their ethnicity.
So, you see what we're coordinated around as a Federation? Again, it's not people's individual failings. In fact, we should be wary of individuating such when it tracks across the population. We should know something other than individual moral failing is at work. I say this because for most of these individual civil servants or leaders, their close friends and relatives may be able to attest to their goodness. Even though collectively, we act in a way that makes everyone worse off.
Four:
"You research how other countries developed and how we humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to living in small groups, city-states, and today's nation-states. Time and time again, you see that having shared intentions and the division of labour is at the heart of it. Leaders are there to coordinate, as the piece succinctly said. But the work itself that needs coordination is done by the people.
I think we need a lot more personal responsibility, as outlined in my earlier comment. We need more opinion leaders to drive self-awareness of our responsibilities as citizens, as much as we hold leaders accountable."
We have a romanticised view of how other developed countries got there. Division of labour, at scale, came through industrialisation and specialisation. Nigeria is largely rural and agrarian. Even with our agriculture policy, from the Agriculture Transformation Agenda to the Agric Promotion Policy, there was never any effort to boost yield or productivity in that sector. Nigerians did their civic duties and rallied around these initiatives, but what do they get for it? More misery.
In developed countries, the elite and by that I mean the different power blocks of the society, with the backing of their constituents, pressured the centre for autonomy. This is the only failing of Nigerians in my view. We are not rebellious enough.
I say this because there is no benevolent government anywhere. Sustained pressure is what compels the government to act right. But we're ethnically fractured and our leaders have it easy navigating those fault lines.
There is cause and effect in everything; actions and their effect, a lot of times, take a long while to manifest. Your habits in your twenties and thirties manifest in your forties, fifties, or even later. We have been on the wrong track for a while.
The question is, how do we fix it? Take into account that development takes time, and the fastest turnaround has been in about 3 to 4 decades (Korea, Singapore, & China), and approaches depend on context. Some others took centuries; most of Western Europe and North America.
That said, here is your last paragraph:
"I say this because there is no benevolent government anywhere. Sustained pressure is what compels the government to act right. But we're ethnically fractured and our leaders have it easy navigating those fault lines."
My take:
Exactly!! We have been saying the same thing from different perspectives.
Yes, sustained pressure compels the government to act, right? But how do you get such sustained pressure given our ethnic and religious differences?
I suggested it starts with taking responsibility, accepting that we have duties as citizens that are required of us if progress is to be made (the idea).
Diffusion research shows that ideas spread fastest when there is similarity within the group. So, we are more likely to listen and adopt an idea from someone who is of the same tribe, religion, socio-economic status, church, mosque, etc.
In this regard, many of us are opinion leaders in our groups and can sway a large number of people to adopt the right ideas. When the right ideas are in a plurality (is now popular), then we have a real consensus to sustain pressure to compel any government to do its part, even as we do ours.
Great discussion, and thank you for the link. I just recently found the Substack and look forward to learning and contributing where possible.
P.S. I will comment briefly on this.
You said:
"We have a romanticised view of how other developed countries got there. Division of labour, at scale, came through industrialisation and specialisation. "
As much as possible, I try to understand exactly how countries developed as far back as possible before government became a serious thing. From the era of kings and emperors to small governments initially, and now to large governments.
Note that every society was, at one time, largely rural and agrarian.
I found the article. Spent an inordinate amount of time looking for it.😀
Here - Tobi's article I was referring to earlier on how ideas "in the air' shape our thoughts and become our reality. He used it in the context of economic policy as opposed to innovation in Gladwell's case.🥰
I loved reading this, and I absolutely agree! Seeing posts that proliferate the "the people have to change for the society to change" always irks me so much, and to all the people I know who have shared some variation of this line of thought with me, I'll send to them this essay. Thank you!
This is undoubtedly the most interesting and comprehensive explanation I've had for some of the issues we face as a country. Coordination is what is missing. .
Cause I know mine would trying to explain these things.
I would never have thought game theory explained this phenomenon. I can easily see it in the games politicians play vis a vis themselves and the Nigerian state, but as a coordination play for the population? Wouldn't have thought of it!!!
Very well said. The leaders are a glimpse of what the followers are. It starts from the people. The behavior of all individuals are directed by the expectation that all other individuals shall exhibit such behavior. It is truly a coordination play.
I became smarter from the intellectual rigor displayed in this article. How can we bring this rigor to everyday people outside of the iron gates of privileged tech? How can this be part of the whole that would stoke a cultural revolution in Nigeria (even if I don't believe in that geographic expression)?
Ẹku isẹ ọpọlọ!!!
I quite agree with your summation and the role leadership plays in coordination, especially in creating a focal point to build from.
I will add that leadership doesn't have to be political. One of the main problems we have is that people don't see that they have duties to play in enjoying the rights we desire.
Part of that duty is an interest in the society's success, even against your preferred leadership of it.
A situation where, because your preferred leadership is not in power, you do not see anything done as a possible step in the right direction makes it very hard for any leader to make a significant impact in our context.
Development is hard work. It involves pain, sacrifices, and time to fruition. A situation where a leader has only four years (a short time), and anyone not in a seat can promise easy solutions to complex problems to take over power, will keep us in a rut where the vast majority believe that the leaders are the only problem.
Yes, we need leadership. But more inclusive leadership from every group that puts society first, irrespective of who is in charge. An idea diffuses fastest where there is similarity.
I think we need more personal responsibility right now. Perhaps with more leaders in their groups accepting their parts to play, we can build a real consensus that holds political leaders accountable as they create the needed focal points to build from.
As much as I agree with you, Nigeria's elites are not as generous in spirit. You'll be surprised how intellectually hollow these people are.
Doesn't mean they're bad people, just not fit purpose. I say this from a personal experience.
Perhaps why we would work to change the narrative in our time as elites are transient.
I'm wont to agree with you because you speak to the teenage/early-to-mid twenties me. But the me of today know that elites may die due to old age but their spawns remain both physically and in abstraction. If by "transient" you meant leaving office, what happens when they do? They get recycled with themselves or one of their spawns who doesn't necessarily have to be biologically related.
Not only that, the ideas they perpetuate (what I meant by "in abstraction") in words and in deed, are even harder to dislodge because human brains have a thing for low-quality info. Not an indictment, it's just easier to process and biology likes to follow the path of least resistance.
It is one of the reasons I like this publication so much because they're doing part of the hard work we have to do for this country in terms of ideas competition. The job for you and I is to first outcompete the bad ideas with good ones. That's the extent to which I agree with you on "work" and "transient".
Bad ideas won't die, but we can tip the odds to favour good ideas such that when political entrepreneurs are shopping around for ideas, the goods one are likely to pop up, say to a 4:1 ratio in favour of good ideas. I'll even take 3:2 as long as good ideas get the edge.
Good ideas are not the end in and of themselves, they're the starting point. There's still the work of sorting which of the good ideas work where and when and the hard work of evaluating and iterating that.
I call these things hard work because apart from the core intellectual problems we need to solve, at the leadership and political level, the money you'll use to do all these nice things (in our own eyes) will come from somewhere. So there's also the political problem. The leader is still going to figure out how to get the buy-in of his colleagues, most likely with opposing interest and equal stakes, who think the money will be better off doing other things, and tell them why this is the best choice. So, nothing can be taken for granted. Other intermediaries will have to emerge to complement 1914 Reader with the facts and intellectual honesty needed to create a possible future many people can lean into.
Understanding these issues and the layers in which they present themselves is what makes stark your position that the lure of "easy solutions to complex problems" is a scam. But guess what? Scammy narratives are easy for the brain to process hence attractive.
I share your passion for development. I have complained only about leaders in the past, but over time, my perspective has changed.
When I started in business, Yar'Adua was in power, then Jonathan came, after him Buhari, and finally Tinubu.
Our clients have mostly been government organizations, so I had the good fortune to interact with civil servants, politicians, and the broader citizenry across Nigeria's regions as we executed projects.
Regardless of who is in power or who is drafted to lead an MDA, civil servants continue their work as usual. You will quickly notice nothing changes. Everyone just complains about the "government."
You are then in villages, towns, and cities across the entire country to execute projects as contracted by the government and such people's representatives. The people don't want to work; they expect handouts. They are not interested in your training and want only the empowerment component, especially the cash component. They also complain about the "government."
You make friends with MDA chief executives and politicians, and you see the immense pressure on them from their constituents. They want handouts, unmerited employment, and underserved contracts without due process, and they want them now. For them, "na our turn".
You see that if you stand against their wishes and try to tell them the right thing, you are quickly hated. You become a wicked man/woman, and your chances of coming back come to zero.
You see the same communities celebrate very rich civil servants, security personnel, politicians, and those with questionable wealth. Honest, hardworking people are despised. They ask them: 'are you not doing the same job?"
You look at those friends in positions and your own experiences, and start asking yourself: if I were in this person's shoes, what would I do differently?
You research how other countries developed and how we humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to living in small groups, city-states, and today's nation-states. Time and time again, you see that having shared intentions and the division of labour is at the heart of it. Leaders are there to coordinate, as the piece succinctly said. But the work itself that needs coordination is done by the people.
I think we need a lot more personal responsibility, as outlined in my earlier comment. We need more opinion leaders to drive self-awareness of our responsibilities as citizens, as much as we hold leaders accountable.
I love your response so much. And I think it's easy to get frustrated with Nigerians and our culture of entitlement, but that's the entire point of this article about coordination.
Let's start with this:
"When I started in business, Yar'Adua was in power, then Jonathan came, after him Buhari, and finally Tinubu."
If you look at the economic indices of the country from the time you started business to now, you'll find that the lot of the average Nigerian has gotten worse. This is not due to their individual failings, it is due to government policies that have consistently failed the people and robbed them of a decent life.
Two:
"Regardless of who is in power or who is drafted to lead an MDA, civil servants continue their work as usual. You will quickly notice nothing changes. Everyone just complains about the "government.""
Civil servants continue their work as usual because every civil servant knows that no individual civil servant can do anything about the status quo and act accordingly around those expectations. When Bolaji Abdullah was Minister of Sports, the National Sports Commission was a different place because he coordinated the staff around the issues he wanted to address. And they rose to the occasion. When someone new comes, they'll simply adjust to the new person's expectations. Or at worst, revert to their steady state, whatever that is.
But that was Abdullah, a small cog. He was minister for months (or maybe years, I dont remember) without meeting the person who appointed him. Neither was he handed a mandate. What can an individual civil servant do here? Or the individual head of an MDA when even they have no focal point? Everybody just goes with their church mind, which will most likely correlate with their narrow interest or folk intuition of what's best. It then becomes a prisoner's dilemma where the pull to defect becomes strong and everyone is worse off.
So a coordination game with no Shelling point becomes a prisoner's dilemma.
Three:
"You are then in villages, towns, and cities across the entire country to execute projects as contracted by the government and such people's representatives. The people don't want to work; they expect handouts. They are not interested in your training and want only the empowerment component, especially the cash component. They also complain about the "government."
You make friends with MDA chief executives and politicians, and you see the immense pressure on them from their constituents. They want handouts, unmerited employment, and underserved contracts without due process, and they want them now. For them, "na our turn" [...]"
People migrate to cities to find opportunities to better their lives. Do our cities fulfil that goal? Our cities are poverty traps. There's a saying that "cities are labour market." I'm not even sure the Lagos State Government or the Kano State Government or Rivers State understands what that means, let's not even mention the Federal Government.
The Federal Government of Nigeria as far as I can tell since the time of Jonathan has been on the trajectory of regressive policies around trade. And the consequences have been the loss of jobs. On a massive scale. Fifty per cent of Nigeria's GDP was wiped off in the eight years of Buhari. Yet, they keep putting more people on the government's payroll. They take your private jobs and(or) your ability to create one for yourself and promise to take care of you. I'm not surprised people act accordingly.
To go back to the point you made here:
"A situation where a leader has only four years (a short time), and anyone not in a seat can promise easy solutions to complex problems to take over power, will keep us in a rut where the vast majority believe that the leaders are the only problem."
The equilibrium we've found ourselves is that, with God on their side, everyone thinks they can be "there" someday. This belief is what you hear every day, everywhere, reinforced by people and institutions of high status. This is how the ideas "in the air" gets into people's heads and become their lived reality. I'll like you to read this article by Malcolm Gladwell.(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/05/12/in-the-air).
I think Tobi has one too, which I'm struggling to find, but this Culture Eats Capital article touched on it.(https://www.1914reader.com/p/culture-eats-capital).
This phenomenon of ideas as a free-floating rationale to use Dan Denntt's term is why, in my opinion, there's a multimillion-dollar PR industry, while on the other hand, some just straight up censor people. Those with power achieve censorship, those with money do PR. I apologise for the digression.
The essential point I'm making here is that the centralised constitution of our government, as bestowed upon us by the military, is achieving its goal whether desired or not. To respond to your quote "na our turn", It's literally their turn. Hello, rotational presidency?! Hello, federal character?! Only that that "turn" is for a selected few. But it gets as close as it gets to people if whoever is of their ethnicity.
So, you see what we're coordinated around as a Federation? Again, it's not people's individual failings. In fact, we should be wary of individuating such when it tracks across the population. We should know something other than individual moral failing is at work. I say this because for most of these individual civil servants or leaders, their close friends and relatives may be able to attest to their goodness. Even though collectively, we act in a way that makes everyone worse off.
Four:
"You research how other countries developed and how we humans evolved from hunter-gatherers to living in small groups, city-states, and today's nation-states. Time and time again, you see that having shared intentions and the division of labour is at the heart of it. Leaders are there to coordinate, as the piece succinctly said. But the work itself that needs coordination is done by the people.
I think we need a lot more personal responsibility, as outlined in my earlier comment. We need more opinion leaders to drive self-awareness of our responsibilities as citizens, as much as we hold leaders accountable."
We have a romanticised view of how other developed countries got there. Division of labour, at scale, came through industrialisation and specialisation. Nigeria is largely rural and agrarian. Even with our agriculture policy, from the Agriculture Transformation Agenda to the Agric Promotion Policy, there was never any effort to boost yield or productivity in that sector. Nigerians did their civic duties and rallied around these initiatives, but what do they get for it? More misery.
In developed countries, the elite and by that I mean the different power blocks of the society, with the backing of their constituents, pressured the centre for autonomy. This is the only failing of Nigerians in my view. We are not rebellious enough.
I say this because there is no benevolent government anywhere. Sustained pressure is what compels the government to act right. But we're ethnically fractured and our leaders have it easy navigating those fault lines.
There is cause and effect in everything; actions and their effect, a lot of times, take a long while to manifest. Your habits in your twenties and thirties manifest in your forties, fifties, or even later. We have been on the wrong track for a while.
The question is, how do we fix it? Take into account that development takes time, and the fastest turnaround has been in about 3 to 4 decades (Korea, Singapore, & China), and approaches depend on context. Some others took centuries; most of Western Europe and North America.
That said, here is your last paragraph:
"I say this because there is no benevolent government anywhere. Sustained pressure is what compels the government to act right. But we're ethnically fractured and our leaders have it easy navigating those fault lines."
My take:
Exactly!! We have been saying the same thing from different perspectives.
Yes, sustained pressure compels the government to act, right? But how do you get such sustained pressure given our ethnic and religious differences?
I suggested it starts with taking responsibility, accepting that we have duties as citizens that are required of us if progress is to be made (the idea).
Diffusion research shows that ideas spread fastest when there is similarity within the group. So, we are more likely to listen and adopt an idea from someone who is of the same tribe, religion, socio-economic status, church, mosque, etc.
In this regard, many of us are opinion leaders in our groups and can sway a large number of people to adopt the right ideas. When the right ideas are in a plurality (is now popular), then we have a real consensus to sustain pressure to compel any government to do its part, even as we do ours.
Great discussion, and thank you for the link. I just recently found the Substack and look forward to learning and contributing where possible.
P.S. I will comment briefly on this.
You said:
"We have a romanticised view of how other developed countries got there. Division of labour, at scale, came through industrialisation and specialisation. "
As much as possible, I try to understand exactly how countries developed as far back as possible before government became a serious thing. From the era of kings and emperors to small governments initially, and now to large governments.
Note that every society was, at one time, largely rural and agrarian.
Yes!💪
I found the article. Spent an inordinate amount of time looking for it.😀
Here - Tobi's article I was referring to earlier on how ideas "in the air' shape our thoughts and become our reality. He used it in the context of economic policy as opposed to innovation in Gladwell's case.🥰
https://www.ideasuntrapped.com/p/beyond-borders-bf6
Fit for* purpose.
I loved reading this, and I absolutely agree! Seeing posts that proliferate the "the people have to change for the society to change" always irks me so much, and to all the people I know who have shared some variation of this line of thought with me, I'll send to them this essay. Thank you!
This is undoubtedly the most interesting and comprehensive explanation I've had for some of the issues we face as a country. Coordination is what is missing. .
Kudos to the 1914 team!
Tobi, your brain will not blow insha Allah 🤲
Amen!
And you too, Feyi.
Cause I know mine would trying to explain these things.
I would never have thought game theory explained this phenomenon. I can easily see it in the games politicians play vis a vis themselves and the Nigerian state, but as a coordination play for the population? Wouldn't have thought of it!!!
Very well said. The leaders are a glimpse of what the followers are. It starts from the people. The behavior of all individuals are directed by the expectation that all other individuals shall exhibit such behavior. It is truly a coordination play.
It’s not chaos, it’s defensive living. very interesting way to look at our society. Thank you for sharing.
This article and the responses here have been fascinating to read as usual.