When I first began travelling across Nigeria to speak about classical liberal and libertarian ideas, I was still early in my professional life and often surprised by how quickly strangers could become collaborators when the purpose was clear. I moved through campuses, churches, civic spaces, and community halls, sometimes arriving in unfamiliar towns with little more than a contact number and a rough plan, yet events often came together before I had fully settled in.
One journey remains vivid: my trip to Kwara State for free market awareness. I arrived after hours on the road, expecting confusion because communication had been uneven. Instead, local volunteers had already arranged chairs, invited participants, tested sound equipment, and begun discussing the theme before the session officially started. Nobody had waited for formal instructions. The local organizer had called a friend, that friend had reached others, and the work had simply moved forward. By the time I stood up to speak, the room already carried its own momentum.
Experiences like that changed how I think about public life. Long before I encountered formal political arguments, I had already seen that society often functions through forms of authority that do not originate in government. Families make decisions without legislation. Schools transmit values without ministries standing in every classroom. Markets adapt faster than regulators can write new rules. Religious communities organize care with a speed that official systems rarely match.
Later, when I read Sphere Sovereignty, I recognized that Abraham Kuyper had given language to something many societies already know instinctively. Human life is not governed through one institution alone. It unfolds through different spheres, each carrying its own responsibilities and limits. The family has its own authority. Education has its own task. Business has its own discipline. Religious institutions have obligations that cannot simply be absorbed by political power.
Kuyper’s argument remains striking because modern governments often move in the opposite direction. Every social difficulty gradually becomes a political assignment. If schools struggle, new directives appear. If communities weaken, legislation expands. If markets fail, regulation multiplies. The assumption beneath all this is that central authority must eventually become the final repairer of society.
Yet much of African life suggests the opposite lesson. In many countries, society survives precisely because institutions outside government continue to carry weight.
Nigeria offers daily examples of this. During economic hardship, it is usually the family that absorbs the first shock. A graduate without work returns home. A sister pays transport fare. A parent delays personal expenses to cover rent. An uncle introduces him to someone who may help him find direction. These arrangements are rarely discussed as political institutions, yet they often keep social life from collapse.
That quiet support reveals something important. Government did not create parental obligation, and no public office can fully replace it.
Education shows the same tension. Across Nigeria, families with modest means still make painful sacrifices to place children in schools they trust. In many homes, tuition is treated not as optional spending but as a moral duty. Parents are not simply buying certificates. They are seeking formation, discipline, and hope.
This is why debates about education are never truly neutral. Every curriculum carries judgments about history, authority, citizenship, and human purpose. A government may regulate standards, but it cannot honestly claim that schooling is merely technical. The classroom always shapes more than knowledge.
Kuyper understood this clearly. His point was not that spheres should exist in isolation, but that each one possesses a proper authority that should not be swallowed by another. Government exists to preserve justice among spheres, not to dominate them all. That distinction matters because weak states often respond to weakness by reaching further into areas they do not understand well.
Across much of Africa, governments frequently intervene where social intelligence already exists. A trader in a local market adjusts prices before dawn because she already senses movement in supply, transport costs, and customer behavior. A mechanic knows which imported parts are becoming scarce before official reports appear. A school proprietor understands which fees parents can survive this term and which ones will empty classrooms.
These decisions emerge from immediate knowledge. They cannot be fully reproduced from a distant capital.
That is why policy often becomes blunt when it ignores local judgment. It may look orderly on paper while producing disorder in practice. As Kuyper put it:
There is a domain of nature, in which the Sovereign exerts power upon matter according to fixed laws. But there is also a domain of the personal, of the domestic, of the scientific, of the social, and of the ecclesiastical life; each of which obeys its own law of life, and each subject to its own head. There is a domain of thought in which no law may prevail except the law of logic. A domain of conscience where none may exercise sovereign rule except the Holy One. And finally, a domain of faith within whose limits only the individual is Sovereign, and through that faith consecrates himself with his whole being.
Nigeria’s fuel history remains a cautionary tale. For years, fuel pricing was held in place through subsidy structures defended as protection for ordinary citizens. The policy sounded compassionate, but daily life told another story. Queues stretched for hours. Small businesses shut down unexpectedly. Transport costs changed overnight. Scarcity became routine.
The contradiction was obvious even before one studied economics. If a country rich in crude oil could not reliably keep fuel available, then the problem was not simply supply. It was institutional design.
The subsidy system attempted to manage a complex reality through fixed decisions made far from the countless adjustments already happening in everyday life. Prices were politically restrained while scarcity moved through informal channels. Arbitrage flourished. Smuggling expanded. Official intentions remained constant while practical outcomes worsened. In short, a system designed to help the public gradually taught citizens to spend hours negotiating around policy.
This is where Kuyper and economic thinkers like Friedrich Hayek unexpectedly converge. Hayek argued that knowledge is scattered across society and cannot be gathered fully by central planners. Kuyper, from another direction, argued that authority must respect the integrity of different spheres because no single institution can rightly carry every responsibility. Both insights challenge political arrogance.
A government may possess legal authority, but legal authority does not automatically produce social intelligence. This lesson extends beyond markets. Religious institutions across Nigeria often provide welfare, emotional support, and moral continuity in places where official systems are thin. Community associations settle disputes before courts ever become involved. Informal civic groups coordinate responses faster than formal structures.
One sees this during crises. Flooding, displacement, inflation, and insecurity often reveal that help arrives first through relationships, not procedures.
This should not lead to romanticism. Families can fail. Religious institutions can abuse trust. Markets can exclude. Schools can become rigid. Every sphere has weaknesses. But acknowledging weakness is different from denying legitimacy.
The modern state often treats independent social authority with suspicion because independent authority limits political reach. Yet societies become healthier when responsibility remains distributed. And where everything waits for government, delay becomes culture.
A parent begins to think moral formation belongs elsewhere. A school waits for directives before acting. A civic association hesitates because legitimacy now feels political rather than social. Over time, society loses initiative.
That loss is difficult to measure but easy to feel. Public life becomes louder politically and thinner institutionally. Citizens expect more from power and less from one another.
Kuyper’s relevance in Africa lies precisely here. He reminds us that liberty survives where authority remains divided in morally intelligible ways. Not fragmented without order but shared across institutions that know their tasks. Kuyper captured the point well:
Now in all of these spheres or circles the cogwheels engage one another, and it is precisely because of the mutual interaction of these spheres that there is an emergence of that rich, many-sided, multi-formed human life; but in that life there is also the danger that one sphere may encroach upon the neighboring sphere; thus causing a wheel to jerk and to break cog upon cog and interfering with the progress of the whole. Hence the reason for existence of a special sphere of authority in the Authority of the State, which must provide for these various spheres … a felicitous interaction, and to keep them within the pale of justice.
This matters for countries where central governments already carry impossible expectations. No capital city can think for millions of people at once. No ministry can replicate the judgment that families, schools, businesses, and communities exercise daily. The stronger path is not institutional conquest but institutional restraint.
Government should secure law, protect rights, and preserve fair space for other spheres to act. It should resist the temptation to become educator, parent, moral tutor, and economic choreographer all at once.
A healthy society depends on institutions government did not create because those institutions teach habits power alone cannot generate. Trust, discipline, sacrifice, initiative, and duty are learned close to life, not announced from above.
The first time I understood this was not in theory. It was in those journeys across Nigeria, watching rooms organize themselves before official structures ever appeared. That memory returns whenever public debate assumes that every answer must begin at the center.
Sometimes society already knows more than power is willing to admit.
