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.
Ownership has three parts, and only the third one frightens anyone
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.
Carry that distinction into a modern company and it cuts deep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A sovereignty you are handed is inert until someone exercises it
Here the history of the place I visited stops being background and becomes the argument.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The right to cut costs you before it pays you
Abusus has a price, and the price comes first.
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 and cheaper later.
The dependency trap is the mirror image. It is cheaper now and far more expensive later. You take the smooth onboarding, the managed everything, the format that only the vendor reads. Nothing hurts on day one. The bill arrives the day you try to exercise a right you quietly gave up.
Most organisations optimise for the comfortable start. They buy usus and fructus at a discount and let abusus lapse. Then they call the result bad luck. It was not luck. It was a purchase order.
I have watched this play out from both chairs, as the buyer who got it wrong years ago and as the advisor who now sees it coming. The pattern never changes. The discount at the start is visible and the bill at the end is deferred, so the brain that signs treats the first as real and the second as hypothetical. It is not hypothetical. It is scheduled. You simply have not been told the date.
France taught the doctrine and mislaid the practice
There is an irony I could not ignore on the flight home.
France gave the modern world a great deal of its vocabulary of sovereignty. The theory is deep here, taught, debated, defended. And yet, inside the companies I work with, the practice of the third right is rare. Leaders optimise use. They optimise returns. The capacity to cut a dependency, to walk away from a vendor, to refuse a captivity, sits unexercised, often unassigned to anyone at all.
The country that first refused Gabon its independence now often forgets to pick up its own. Not at the level of the state. At the level of the ordinary company that runs the country’s economy. The doctrine is intact. The muscle has gone soft.
I say this without contempt. Comfort does this to everyone. When the power stays on, the vendors stay solid, and the formats mostly work, the reflex to keep an exit fades. Why pay for a door you never expect to use. The answer arrives with the first acquisition, the first price change, the first strategic pivot you did not choose. By then the door has been walled over, quietly, one convenient decision at a time.
I am not romanticising anywhere. The infrastructure constraints I saw were real, sometimes severe. But a constraint you can name is not the thing that costs you the most. What costs you is a right you never use because you forgot you held it.
What the man in the car already knew
Go back to the first evening, the long drive from the airport, the driver talking about his son who writes code.
What he said, in his own words, was that he wanted his son to build things he could keep. Not rent forever. Keep. Change. Walk away from if needed. He did not know Roman law and he did not need to. He had the instinct that the lawyers spent centuries formalising. Ownership is the right to dispose.
I think that is why the week unsettled me. I did not meet more knowledge there. I met more instinct. People who had never been able to assume that a system would simply keep working, and who therefore never confused using a thing with owning it. That confusion is a luxury. Luxuries make you soft in ways you only notice once they are taken away.
I came home with that instinct ringing louder than any of my notes on bandwidth. Sovereignty is not the title. It is the third right, exercised by someone who is willing to pay for it before it pays them back. Ask yourself the uncomfortable version tonight. On the systems that run your company, do you hold the right to cut? And if you do, when did you last prove it?
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Léon M’ba”, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_M%27ba
- France 24, “1960: The year of independence”, 2010. https://www.france24.com/en/20100214-1960-year-independence
- BlackPast.org, “Léon M’ba (1902-1967)”, 2011. https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/people-global-african-history/leon-mba-1902-1967/
FAQ
What is the difference between usus, fructus, and abusus?
They are the three components of ownership in Roman law: usus is the right to use a thing, fructus is the right to profit from it, and abusus is the right to dispose of or destroy it. Most companies hold the first two rights over their systems but never exercise the third — the right to cut a vendor loose — which is the right that actually defines ownership.
Why does the right to cut a vendor matter more than daily usage or profit?
Because usage and profit are felt every day, so they get attention, while the right to cut is only tested once — the day you try to leave. If leaving takes quarters or depends on a vendor’s goodwill, you never actually held that right; you were a well-treated guest, not an owner. The right hides behind the least-used door, so nobody misses it until the exit is blocked.
