Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… “Who asked you to say that?” the spokesmen were asked. “Who is behind you?” To this question came the reply: “Piny Owacho.” (The Country Says.) —Oginga Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru If we put down The Prince and pick up Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy , we might see that the matter of political power is much more complex than the Newtonian application of pressure and force, of love and fear. Political power is a quantum affair. It moves in ways that can be counterintuitive. It empowers whomever it empowers and, just as swiftly, will abandon whomever it wills, usually those teetering at the height of their hubris. Many of our leaders remain locked in a logic of power that is maximalist, accumulative, fundamentally neoliberal, and colonialist in its genesis. The will of the majority of the people is seen as that of the rabble, as it were. And any attempt to mobilize against unfair dictates is seen not as an attempt to be heard but as a challenge to be quelled. So that when governance oversteps the bounds of human decency, when hospitals are in a state of disrepair despite crushing tax burdens, criticism is potentially seen as an act of treason rather than an attempt at holding leaders accountable. This approach to power is woven into the works of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, and others. It started with colonial officers visiting the village or town, the establishment of the hut tax, and the eventual erosion of indigenous liberty in the interest of a queen or king in a foreign land. Very little has changed, unfortunately, and we must begin to break apart this fundamental logic to move past extractive governance and towards real national leadership. Legitimacy is the fulcrum of political power, and the way we conceive of it needs to be looked at again carefully. We have entered a more anarchic world where simply attaching oneself to a geopolitical pole is no longer enough to protect national interests. In this context, the idea of depending on external powers and ideas for internal political legitimacy is simply no longer strategically viable. The Khaldunian approach to legitimacy When I was younger, I became exasperated at the inability of Western analytical models to be applied to the so-called Global South. I saw that the state-building approaches used during the Arab Spring failed miserably in places like Libya and Syria because of the inability for these frameworks to understand legitimacy past structure, institution, and process. Ibn Khaldun’s model of political change allowed me to approach political legitimacy in terms of dynamics as opposed to structure and technique. His concept of Asabiyah pointed to the importance of agency over these structures and a conceptualization of legitimacy based on collective equilibrium as opposed to domination. I do believe that this approach may serve us in looking at legitimacy from another, more human, standpoint. The first position that Ibn Khaldun takes is that power is immanent in the individual; it stems from the people, as it were, and is pooled towards leadership through a process of legitimization. This means that legitimacy is immanent and is found within the people first and foremost. No matter what one does, however one may spin it, this remains immutable. Second, Ibn Khaldun describes history as cyclical. It goes from the establishment of a polity, its apex, decline into decadence, and subsequent renewal by what he calls the nomads, what we can call the people , from the periphery of power. When a new polity is established, it is based on a shared group feeling , or Asabiyah . We can call it a sense of nationalism, of solidarity. This shared Asabiyah binds the people together with leaders emerging who can define and protect the interests of the polity in an inclusive manner. (There is no ideological definition of this dynamic, and political power can be defined functionally in terms of the control over the flow of wea