Three Months of Insight: A Journey Through State Decay

Last week on The Sunday Stew, we shared the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI). I created this index as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is a tool to measure how much a state's legal power differs from its actual situation. I wanted to follow up with the first part of a three-part series about how the DSI works.

Then, last week, something happened that made me think deeply.

On Wednesday, Zenodo, the open-access platform by CERN and the European Commission, published my 16,315-word paper titled "The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty, A Theoretical Statement." The next day, Harvard Dataverse, run by Harvard University, published the same work. Then, on Friday morning, I got an email from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR) in Germany, saying they had also accepted and published the paper.

I reflected on this for a while. It has been exactly three months since The Sunday Stew started. In those three months, we created an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). During this time, the framework gained recognition worldwide, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three respected academic repositories within three days. I thought about the symmetry of it: three months, three contributions, three publications in one week.

Numbers can mean more than just math. This one felt significant.

The Seed Planted in a Library

When I started The Sunday Stew, I didn't plan to be a framework creator or theorist. Looking back, I see that the seed was planted long ago, by chance, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.

I was working on a term paper about Nigerian history. My lecturer was the late Dr Erim O. Erim, a tough marker. As I browsed the shelves, I noticed a book by Sigmund Freud. It was in the history section, and I wondered why. I borrowed it and read it in a week.

Among the concepts I learned from Freud, one struck me: his idea of immortality. He said immortality means being remembered by many unknown people. It's not mystical but a psychological idea. It means leaving behind ideas that many people use to understand their own lives, even if they never meet you.

Freud didn't just create theories. He changed how we talk. Because of him, people use words like ego, subconscious, and defence mechanism every day, even if they never read his work. They are using his ideas without knowing it. That, he said, was immortality.

I was just a student looking for Nigerian history, but I found a way to think about intellectual legacy. I didn't know at the time that I was given a guide for my journey.

The Book C. Don Handed Me

Years later, living in Lagos, I had a friend and mentor named C.Don Adinuba. His home in Ilupeju felt like my second home. I could visit anytime. C.Don was a great host, and his wife was warm and welcoming. He knew I loved books and was one of the smartest people I knew.

One day, he handed me a book and said, "Go and read this." I looked at it and asked, "Who is Edward Said?" He just said, "Read the book."

Representations of the Intellectual, based on Said's 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC, became one of the most influential books I've read. In it, I discovered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks shaped my thinking and development. Said argued that an intellectual's job is to speak truth to power and represent the unrepresented. This idea helped me understand the true purpose of serious journalism.

From Gramsci, I learned that intellectuals aren't just in universities or research institutes. Gramsci said that intellectual work happens wherever people shape ideas and interpret reality. This made me realize that journalism is not just about reporting; it is an intellectual pursuit.

As a journalist, I do more than share facts. I help shape public discussions, challenge power, highlight social issues, and contribute to a global exchange of ideas. This understanding deepened my commitment to society. It reinforced my belief that journalism should inform, enlighten, challenge assumptions, and give people the knowledge they need to make informed choices.

Gramsci's views showed me that journalists connect structured knowledge with public life. The job is not just to report events but to seek truth, interpret developments, and help society grow intellectually and morally. For me, journalism became more than just a job; it turned into a form of public engagement.

These two books, one discovered by chance and one given to me by C.Don, laid the foundation for everything I write in this column. I didn't realize it back then, but I do now.

The Question That Started Everything

When The Sunday Stew launched on 8th March, I imagined a column focused on faith, character, and the forces shaping society, especially in Nigeria and Africa. The second edition on 15 March changed our direction. Titled “A Country Without Earthquakes, Yet Shaken by Itself,” it looked at Nigeria's man-made disasters, contrasting them with natural disasters in other countries. The insights from writing that piece, inspired by a 2012 interview with the late Professor Jubril Aminu, shaped the analytical approach of this column.

At first, I only wanted to understand why Nigeria suffers so much. I wanted to know why communities keep burying their dead under the same circumstances, while the state keeps issuing the same predictable statements and reports that go nowhere. I set out to do journalism.

I didn't expect that my honest pursuit of this question would lead to what academic circles call a macro-theoretical framework. I also didn't foresee that this framework would find a place at Harvard and other top institutions.

The Trinity of State Decay didn't appear overnight. It came from my frustration as a scholar-journalist who watched foreign theories fail to explain what I saw happening every day.

Failed state theory is useful but only scratches the surface. It names the problem but doesn't explain how it happens. The Fragile States Index offers rankings but doesn't identify the causes. What we needed was a local framework to explain how sovereign authority breaks down and is replaced by rival powers.

The insight came to me simply: states don't lose control by chance. They lose it systematically along three lines, Money, Land, and Mind. When a state loses financial control, territorial authority, and ideological power over its people, something else takes over. Not chaos, but a Shadow Order that can be more effective than the formal state it replaces.

This is what the Trinity of State Decay explores. It’s not just about state failure; it’s about how alternatives to the state emerge.

The world of knowledge production usually has a center and a periphery. The center creates theories while the periphery applies them. Right now, with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU) and The Insecurity Triad gaining attention in global academic circles, we see that intellectual rigor doesn't have a specific location.

Publishing the Trinity of State Decay on global platforms isn't the end. It marks the start of a conversation years in the making. If in the future, a professor at Harvard or a student in Makerere finds it useful for their work, we will have succeeded. They may never know me, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.

Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself

I started reflecting on the symmetry of three: three months, three contributions, three publications. But I've realized that symmetry isn't always clear at the start. It often becomes visible only in hindsight, which is also how Sovereignty Decoupling shows itself to those experiencing it.

A young man browsing a library, finding Freud by chance. A mentor sharing Edward Said over a table. Years of journalism asking tough questions about our nation's struggles. A column that began with political commentary and transformed into deep theoretical work. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in one week.

Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. With SSOAR confirming on Friday, our global presence now includes seven important repositories when we add the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. It seems the symmetry isn't done with me yet.

The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Question it. Use it. Explore its limits. That is exactly why it exists.

Trust is sacred. Stay informed.