I Was Wrong About Agency

Today I got a glimpse into the informal economy, the actual skeleton underneath the dysfunction I keep writing about, and it clarified something I got wrong in one of my earliest pieces.

Last year, in what seems to be my most bright-eyed, green horned piece— The Future Must Be Led By High-Agency Individuals, I argued that Nigeria's future depended on cultivating high-agency individuals: people who recognize obstacles, adapt to reality, and act independently to shape outcomes.

While the definition itself wasn't wrong (it could pass on a technicality), what was wrong is everything I built on top of it, and the underlying assumptions that went unsaid.

So today I heard about two ways people are quietly making bank off government processes. One is basically knowing the land certification system well enough to move faster than everyone else and flipping that speed into money. The other is getting ahead of people whose property is about to be affected by a road expansion, before they even know it's coming, and taking a cut in the middle. Neither one builds anything. It's pure navigation, being faster and earlier than the next person.

Both of these people recognised an obstacle, adapted to reality with precision and independently to shape an outcome in their favour.

By the definition I gave earlier, both are textbook high-agency individuals. My own words from that piece: "With my understanding of government policy, business, and finance, I can already see ten different ways to create real value."

If you were to swap "create" for "extract", that sentence describes it perfectly.

I never defined what "real value" meant in that piece. I used the word as if it did analytical work, when it was only rhetorical, requiring that the reader would assume a good outcome without the framework ever actually selecting for one.

Basically, I was conflating agency with a sense of morality.

I took the word to already contain long-term thinking, social interest and good judgment, when really it was just the capacity to act, ignoring the system that capacity operates inside. Agency, on its own, is a smaller part of the answer than I gave it credit for. It doesn't come pre-loaded with direction. It goes wherever the system it's operating in rewards it to go, and right now, the system is fully geared toward extraction.

That piece closed with a version of a theory of change I no longer believe: "One person plants a seed. Ten years later, ten others follow. Ten years after that, one hundred more. In thirty years, you have a culture shift."

I've since written in a different piece, that this exact assumption of relying on enough individuals to simply orient correctly does not hold up. History is not kind to it. I said that plainly in We Live in a Society but somehow missed the connection.

The old, naive piece is still up, still readable, still mine, so this is not a walk-back dressed up as an update. This is a working hypothesis built from two examples I encountered in a single day, not provable at scale, but enough to be sure that the problem was never a shortage of agency. The problem is what the system pays out for, and agency simply follows the money.

That's where I am today.

It's less certain than where I was a year ago, but more accurate.

I'll take that trade every time.