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The Right to Cut: What Gabon Taught Me About Sovereignty
Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash
Francois Aichelbaum<br>Life lover. Grumpy. Techy. Traveler. Founder of Privateer.
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Ownership has three parts, and only the third one frightens anyone<br>A sovereignty you are handed is inert until someone exercises it<br>The right to cut costs you before it pays you<br>France taught the doctrine and mislaid the practice<br>What the man in the car already knew<br>Sources<br>Real sovereignty is not the capacity you are granted. It is the capacity you are willing to use, and its sharpest test is the right to cut: to leave a vendor, to delete your data, to sever a dependency you no longer accept. Gabon reminded me of this over a single week. France, which taught the world a great deal about sovereignty, seems to have mislaid the practice of it.<br>Ownership has three parts, and only the third one frightens anyone<br>Roman law split ownership into three rights. Usus, the right to use a thing. Fructus, the right to enjoy what it produces. Abusus, the right to dispose of it, to change it, to destroy it. You did not truly own something until you held the third right. A tenant has usus. A shareholder has fructus. Only the owner has abusus.<br>Carry that distinction into a modern company and it cuts deep.<br>You use your software every day. That is usus. You build your operations on top of it and you profit from it. That is fructus. Now the third question. Can you dispose of it? Can you export everything, delete the account, sever the vendor, and walk away without asking anyone’s permission? That is abusus, and most organisations simply do not have it.<br>They feel like owners because they use the system and profit from it. Two rights out of three. The right that actually defines ownership, they signed away without noticing, usually inside a data-format clause or an access policy nobody read to the end.<br>Picture the test in practice. You decide, on a Monday, to leave your main platform. How long until your data is fully in your hands, in a form your next system can read, with the old vendor no longer able to hold anything back. If the honest answer is measured in quarters, or if it depends on the vendor’s goodwill, you were never the owner. You were a long-term guest with a confident vocabulary.<br>I keep meeting leaders who are surprised by this. They run the company. They pay the invoices. And they discover, the day they want to leave, that leaving was never theirs to decide.<br>There is a reason this stays invisible. Usus and fructus are felt every day. You touch them. Abusus is felt once, on the day you try to leave, and by then it is too late to acquire it. The one right that matters most is also the one nobody misses until the exit is blocked. Ownership hides its most important part behind the least used door.<br>A sovereignty you are handed is inert until someone exercises it<br>Here the history of the place I visited stops being background and becomes the argument.<br>In November 1959, Léon M’ba, who would become Gabon’s first president, argued openly for departmentalization. He wanted the territory to stay a French department rather than become an independent state. Jacques Foccart, de Gaulle’s man for African affairs, told him the idea was unthinkable. Gabon became independent on 17 August 1960, whether its leading politician had chosen that path or not.<br>That detail has stayed with me. A sovereignty handed down from above is not the same object as a sovereignty taken up from below. One is a status printed on a document. The other is a capacity that somebody wakes up and exercises. You can be declared independent and still spend every morning waiting for someone else to decide the things that matter.<br>Companies inherit sovereignty the same inert way. A contract says the data is yours. An audit says you are compliant. A slide says you are in control. None of it moves until a named person chooses to use the third right, and proves it.<br>Proof is the whole point. An unexercised right decays into a decoration. A muscle you never use still shows on the anatomy chart and still cannot lift anything. Sovereignty is that kind of muscle. It exists on the org chart, in the contract, in the compliance file. Whether it can lift anything is a separate question, and the only honest way to answer it is to try.<br>The right to cut costs you before it pays you<br>Abusus has a price, and the price comes first.<br>To keep the right to leave, you pay upfront. You insist on open export formats when a proprietary one would be smoother today. You keep the root access even when handing it over would be more convenient. You build a little internal competence you could have rented. Every one of these choices is more expensive now...