Power & Incentives
The Architecture of African Power
How incentives shape Africa's political systems, and what that means for institutional reform.
April 2026
14 min read
The Archive
Essays.
Long-form thinking on power, scarcity, institutions and the structural behaviour of society. Read slowly. The arguments compound.
001 002 Scarcity & Behaviour
Poverty Is Not the Absence of Wealth
Scarcity as a form of intelligence, and why the privileged consistently misread the decisions of the poor.
March 202611 min read003 Institutional Psychology
The Quiet Collapse of Institutional Memory
How institutional knowledge is lost between governments, and the consequences for public administration.
February 202618 min read004 Culture & Civilisation
Yoruba Statecraft Before the Empire
Reading the pre-colonial Yoruba polity as a sophisticated theory of distributed authority, ritual restraint, and consent.
January 202622 min read005 Governance & Political Systems
Elite Incentives and the Language of Reform
Reform rarely fails because of ignorance. It fails because of incentives nobody is willing to name in public.
December 20259 min read006 Human Behaviour
The Grammar of Public Anger
Why public outrage moves in predictable cycles - and what those cycles tell us about the structure of public attention.
November 202512 min read