Guest post: The Global IQ Debate: A Modest Contribution From A Resident African

What is it like to live in a society with an estimated median IQ around 70? A Nigerian psychologist explains.

An introduction by Tove K:

Two decades of nothing happening in global IQ research

In 2002, Richard Lynn's and Tatu Vanhanen's book IQ and the Wealth of Nations was published. I was 18 years old by then. I read about the book in the newspaper, took a glance at this map

Median national IQs according to IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, 2002, Wikimedia Commons

and immediately brushed off the entire idea as laughable. If people in the Democratic Republic Congo had a median IQ of less than 65, that means that most of the country must be populated by retards, I concluded. Such a stupid idea! In other words, twenty three years ago I did exactly what Lyman Stone did last month and judged the entire idea of global IQ comparisons impossible because such comparisons imply that among some peoples median IQ lies below the level under which most Westerners are counted as intellectually retarded.

I didn't return to the question until 2012, when I stumbled over Wikipedia's page on Race and intelligence. I was baffled by the content. I had believed that little was known on global IQ differences, and found out that a lot was indeed known. For me, the idea was deeply disturbing. I had previously believed that all people in the world had more or less the same intellectual capabilities as people in the society where I lived. The indications that this was not the case meant that the world was much worse off than I had expected.

In order to understand the question better, I learned everything I could about both global IQ numbers and the IQ concept in general. My conclusion became that there seems to be something behind the numbers. The measured differences are too consistent over time and different environments to just be explained away. But also, IQ is a very imprecise concept. The Flynn effect, if anything, shows that.

And this is how far I got. During the decade that has passed since then, I have found very little valuable information on the subject. People who believe a lot in the relevance of IQ measurements continue to make advanced estimates. People who believe that IQ comparisons across societies are nonsensical continue to nitpick the former.

To get any further, we need new input. And that input has to come from the disadvantaged parts of the world itself. Only people who are deeply familiar with Africa can tell the rest of us anything more about what it actually means that Africans have this-or-that average IQ.

For that reason I asked Charlatan, a psychologist from Nigeria who writes the blog ISOE, to write a guest post on the subject. Charlatan is only one of 1.4 billion Africans. But one is more than zero and I hope that many other Africans and people familiar with Africa will follow his example. And I hope that media platform owners will give them the space they deserve.

When an area of research gets stalled this way, entirely new hypotheses need to be formed. That is what Charlatan is doing: He not only explains what things look like on the ground, but also proposes new lines of inquiry in addition to the old and familiar ones. It is partly anecdotal and tentative. But at this stage, I think that brainstorming from people who know the field is exactly what we need. It is a way to start thinking about Africa.

Charlatan writes a Substack called ISOE. Here is his essay:

The Global IQ Debate: A Modest Contribution From A Resident African

Specifically, this is a contribution from and by a Nigerian.

Disclaimer: Consider my takes in this essay the radical opinion of just one Nigerian who is by no means representative of either the sentiments of his people or their dominant habits. I'm a single man in my mid-thirties from the Yoruba ethnic group (one of the three major tribes in Nigeria). I work as a practicing clinical psychologist based in Lagos (the cultural and economic epicenter of Nigeria). As you’d eventually come to see, if you persist long enough with this writeup, a good number of highly educated Nigerians (and no doubt Africans) would unsurprisingly disagree with most of my takes here. But I also hoped that I was able to build a strong enough argument as to help the reader have some insight into the ‘why’ of this disagreement and indeed, as to its expectedness. Also, this is a topic I've never written about before, never seriously have had to think about before, and not remotely my domain of expertise. So, keep this in mind as you contemplate how much weight should be given the views expressed here. And most importantly, I hope that mine would trigger a much needed consciousness among those of my racial compatriots who are better qualified and more intelligent than me to start engaging seriously with this subject matter.

Briefly on the origin and purpose of this essay

Tove K recently published on her Substack an essay titled: We Need To Think About Africa. I loved her thoughtful and compassionate take and posted this comment:

Thanks for grappling with the African question(s). This is certainly a more thoughtful consideration than can be said of most African intellectuals who are frustratingly reactionary, allowing their overbloated and insecure egos to dictate their thinking.

I'm a Nigerian who lives in Nigeria and has no intention of leaving now or in the future. As popular as the discourse of national IQs is in the West or among academics, I'm yet to come across a single African commentator or public intellectual engaging with this discourse. I think it further confirms the claim of low IQ when a people are not even self-aware enough to grapple with this question.

The overwhelmingly predominant attitude among the educated elite in Africa is that Africa's problem has nothing to do with cognitive disadvantage and more to do with Western oppression or bad leadership or colonialism or... whatever other external agent they can think of. One of the consequences of low IQ is the inability to organize at scale and mobilize collective actions while setting a far reaching national goals that transcend tribal sentiments.

I watch with pity as we continue to hope for some kind of cultural/political revolution and wonder how this is expected to happen when even the most elite among our people are incredibly self-serving and cowardly in the face of moral moral, spiritual, and political corruption.

It's a big utter mess from top to bottom of the hierarchy!!!

Then Tove K graciously replied:

Can I ask you a few questions about how the intellectual abilities of Nigerians appear to you? When I “discovered” the global IQ question about a decade ago, I asked all people I knew who had met any greater number of allegedly high IQ and low IQ populations, in order to get an impression of what the numbers could mean in reality. Since I didn't know any people who had met numerous Africans more than superficially, I didn't get any good answer to the question how people in Africa actually appear in everyday life.

One conclusion I have drawn is that IQ 70 simply must mean something else in Africa compared to in Europe. On an academic level, it might mean the same thing as in Europe. But on a social level it just can't mean the same thing as in Europe, because the few percent of Europeans who have an IQ below 70 tend to be not only intellectually backward, but also socially backward. If an important share of Africans can meaningfully be said to have an IQ below 70, then that should mean that there is a very common phenotype in Africa that does not exist much in Europe: A kind of person who is not good at reading, math and logic, but who is socially capable and witty. (I think that this is what Arthur Jensen (cited by Cremieux Recueil) meant by concluding that low IQ black children were “normal”).

As an African, and a psychologist, what would you say about this speculation? From my side it is little more than an educated guess, because I have never been to Africa and met a representative sample of people. Do you have any thoughts on how it could be possible, or impossible, that a large part of Africans have IQs below the level on which Westerners are unable to function normally in society?

Also I would like to ask you about the upper distribution of IQ in Africa. Are IQs of 120 really as rare in Nigeria as IQs of 150 are in the West? (And I'm a bit skeptical of the notion of “IQ 150” in general - I don't believe that IQ tests are meaningful above a certain point). Obviously, there is intelligent life in Africa and also, Africa is much more genetically diverse than Europe. Those are reasons to suspect that the bell curve is not entirely bell shaped in at least some parts of Africa. What is your impression? How does high intelligence manifest itself where you live?

Then Apple Pie Chimed in:

Thank you for making this comment. Most of us don't have any direct experience with Africa; do you see any avenues for improvement? I can see from this comment (and also your post at

Of Nigeria And The Lack Of Originality And Innovation

) that you're pretty pessimistic about change arising from within, but what are the most likely avenues by which external aid could make a genuine difference? Do you think education, or nutritional supplementation (say, via iodine) would have a meaningful impact? What about reducing the birth rate among the poorer classes to reduce the rates of malnutrition and stunting?

I guess what I'm asking is, if you had $10,000,000 and a hundred humanitarian aid workers ready to focus on improving one thing in Nigeria, what do *you* think would be the element that would bring the most improvement to your country? Would it be trying to improve roads, or reduce government corruption, or conditions in schools, or what?

I posted the full commentaries rather than snippets because a good portion (and perhaps the most inaccessible portion in public databases) of this essay would be my attempt to wrestle with the very challenging questions posed by both Tove K and Apple Pie. Tove K would eventually invite me to write a guest post after a brief exchange for which I’m very grateful. To be honest, even though I’ve been laboriously following the national IQ discourse, mostly on Substack, I’ve never really seriously thought about it from a first person-plural perspective (until I began working on this writeup). My participation has always been as a curious and amused third-party observer. I genuinely admire all those who have been theoretically, empirically, and philosophically working and thinking about the national IQ question irrespective of their conclusions.

The people occupying the south end of the Sahara Desert have been disparately estimated to have an average IQ score that is either as low as 65 (in the worst estimate) or as high as 82 (in the most generous). If we exclude studies less methodologically rigorous and those with less representative samples, the findings further converge within a narrower range of something between 67 and 77. As I will explain in this essay, I see no reason to doubt those numbers.

Now to Tove K’s first query

“How rare is IQ of 120?” Honestly, I can't give a fact-based answer. But I'd say it depends on the sample pool you're looking at. Among the upper middle class, I'd suppose it's not that rare, but it's likely to be rarer, very rare, among classes lower than upper middle. In my own cohort (mid-thirties and within the mid-mid to low-mid bracket in socioeconomic class, peak combined monthly parental earnings of about 500,000 naira, which is about 328 dollars by current exchange rate), my estimate would be about 10%. Why? I once took the gold standard IQ test, WAIS for adult, along with a few colleagues (about 12-15 of us) who were in the same master’s program with me. None of them clocked 120 (I think the highest among them was 115. Most were within the 90 - 110 bracket) and only I exceeded the 120 mark. However, almost all of them outperformed me in academic outcome. Why? The Nigerian educational system is structured to favor and reward individuals with high rote learning capacity with very little regard for independent and creative thinking. To illustrate this point, the entrance exam for my MSc program at the country's premier university (University of Ibadan) was both a test of speed and scope of knowledge of psychology in general. We were to answer about 120 multiple choice questions in, I think, 60 minutes. I had the highest score (and I didn’t have to open a book). Yet, in the program itself, I couldn't make a PhD grade. And trust me, I'm a very conscientious student, the type that sits in front of the class and doesn't miss a single lecture. Interestingly, it took just a single class for my colleagues to peg me as "the guy" to watch out for mostly due to a combination of a nerdy and serious vibe (I wear glasses) coupled with my contributions in class. All of them would be scandalized to hear I didn't even make PhD grade. And to be honest, this failure wasn't due to the inherent bias in the educational system alone, it was also impacted by a brain that is weak in long-term memory and rote learning, as well as a personality that's quite high in apathy.

The implication of this anecdote is this: you don't need a high IQ to do well in a typical Nigerian educational system and, in fact, a real IQ that exceeds certain upper bound may be a disadvantage: I’d say, in general, the correlation between academic outcome and IQ is significant but negligibly so. It is one of my reasons for forecasting that the average IQ of college samples would not differ by a very wide margin from what is already estimated of the general population.

One last anecdote to support this argument. I once worked with a female clinical psychologist colleague who was at the time pursuing her PhD at the same premier university I mentioned above. This lady, wanting to learn how to administer and score WAIS, volunteered herself as the subject. As the result would show, her verbal IQ was in the low 90's (91-92) and her performance IQ was in the low 80's. And trust me, this is by no means a rarity. If anything, it's probably the norm as the lady in question is not different in substance and psychological profile from many other PhD candidates I know. How is this possible? The very low entry standard for PhD programs and the positive can-do-anything spirit of an average Nigerian (with God on their side, nothing is impossible for an average Nigerian).

And I dare say that a good percentage of academics (say about 70%, if I were to use my own discipline - this estimated proportion is expected to vary both ways as one moves across various disciplines) would clock an IQ of less than 100 in a standardized intelligence test. One of my clinical psychology professors once declared in class that homosexuals must be demonically possessed because he couldn't fathom how a man can be attracted to another man. And this is a view 90% of academics, irrespective of their field, would absolutely endorse. I'll explain later why this supernatural view of a naturalistic phenomenon expressed by one of the high priests of knowledge in the country is both illustrative and instructive about how the mind of an average African works. And by the way, the one colleague who I said achieved an IQ score of 115 finished with a first-class grade in his undergraduate and had one of the best results in my MSc. class. He is currently in the UK where he has bagged a second master’s degree and is already pursuing his PhD. And he's by no means an exception in following this particular career trajectory. He has a brain sufficiently capable of overcoming normal academic challenges, and an attitude that's resolute in pursuing success beyond the shores of Nigeria. But as I'll argue later, his type merely exploits the mechanical aspects of the educational system without engaging whatsoever with the scientific spirit behind it. They are masters of procedures but deficient in imbibing the fundamental principles behind them. In fact, the majority of the educated elite in Nigeria rejects, explicitly or implicitly, the scientific worldview from which modern education emerged. More on this point later.

On the social functioning of Nigerians with IQ lower than 80

Tove K next wondered about the comparative social ramifications of IQs less than 80 in Europe and Africa. I have decided to look at it from a slightly different angle. I don't think it results in different social dynamics as she supposed. Rather, I think that an IQ of 80 or less is more than enough to effectively function in a typical sub-Saharan society for a couple of reasons.

• First, I'm inclined to think that one of the critical distinctions between the social functioning of Africans and Europeans with IQ below 80 isn't in their functional capacity, but in their functional context. When you're operating in a socially sophisticated environment, your cognitive level is more likely to be exposed, and deficit punished swiftly and harshly. This is also partly because social adaptation is less about IQ and more about cultural adaptation through observational and participatory learning. Yes, norms, within and between societies, vary in level of behavioral sophistication, ethical considerations, and entry standards. I think in Africa, all of these tend to be lower and more primitive compared to Europe or even some niche elite groups within Africa.

• Second, when the majority of the people you interact with are of the same average IQ, outliers are more likely to be individuals with high IQ (anything from 120 and above) rather than low ones.

• Third, most of Africa being a highly tribal/communal/family-oriented society, there's far less pressure on the individual to prove themselves socially or intellectually worthy before enjoying the privilege of belonging (this is what I meant by lower entry standards). Your tribal, familial, and/or socioeconomic affiliation is all you need to gain admission or recognition within most public or traditional institutions. There are hardly any prestigious institutions in which admittance is based purely on merit (I know this is true anywhere else in the world but truer in Nigeria). The only real obstacle to getting into circles of prestige, whether academic or political, is money, pedigree, and connection.

So, back to the point I have only so far made passing references to: if Africa has a real IQ disadvantage, I don't think it is much in the cognitive dimension. Nigerians, as you probably know, are a notoriously successful immigrant group - even after we take selection bias into account (although some data have shown that second generation diasporic Nigerians, and immigrants from third world in general, tend to regress eventually to their country of origin means). But I think when the environment is optimal and held constant, and the incentive structures are robust, I don't think there'll be significant difference in pure average academic performance between children of African and European (or of Asian) descent. I think if there's indeed a dysgenic factor, it must lie in some other property of the 'mind' (which I'm using to mean 'emergent brain function'). And one such property is what I would call 'Information processing', not of facts and factoids printed and presented in textbooks but of the raw unstructured reality. The kind of ongoing information processing that gives rise to how a people conceive of reality, what they think this reality, as conceptualized by them, demands of them in order to maximize its impartial offerings, and how they believe this reality should be interrogated and organized.

This is by far the most fundamental sense in which I think the poor countries of this world are different from the rich ones. I suspect it's less about raw cognitive capacities and more about cognitive propensities: what are the kind of questions about reality that engage the intellectual faculties of cognitively capable Africans versus their European counterparts? I also think this is one of the reasons why the success of immigrants from Africa to the West is mostly mechanical rather than organic. I believe their academic failure rate will be higher the more the academic structure in the West incorporates elements that demand engagement with the underlying scientific worldview - that is, the philosophical question of the nature of reality. It's one reason why most African immigrants are able to adapt educationally and professionally but not culturally. And it's the reason why even western-educated Africans are often unable to import the philosophical spirit of the scientific mindset whenever they return home. The majority of them never quite imbibe that spirit and the majority of natives at home absolutely reject it as well. Mind you, they do acknowledge and admire the beautiful and organized outcomes of the techno-scientific West, but somehow the core attitude that engendered those outcomes never quite sticks.

But I have argued in another essay that it's practically impossible to achieve Western level development without imbibing the scientific mindset that begat and sustains it. Even Communist Buddhist China had to consciously and deliberately westernize in some aspects to see real competitive development. And I must say that I think it's wrong to equate the scientific worldview to Western worldview; the West just happened to discover it first or at least was the first axis of humanity to fully realize and maximize its latent powers. It's freely and openly accessible to any other people who can see that there's currently no superior framework for processing and engaging reality for collective prosperity.

Let me illustrate this point further with a vivid and personal example: as already mentioned, I'm from a family that can be classified as low- to middle-middle class by African standards. My parents are both university-educated and have just enough money to send all four of their kids bar one to public universities (they're far cheaper than private ones but slightly more prestigious, at least for now). I'm the second of 4 children and I have an older brother and two younger sisters. This brother of mine is academically brilliant and is currently a tenured faculty at a top 3 university in the UK. He attained this feat before he clocked 33 years. However, and here's the tragedy: with all these scholarly accomplishments and exposure to the very peak of cultural refinement, he is extremely religious (not so much in outward presentation as in thinking) in a way not even my parents are (and mind you, my dad is a full-time though retired clergy in one of the largest Pentecostal organizations in Nigeria). This brother of mine is so thoroughly oriented to process reality almost exclusively through the lens of his Christian faith that it has become absolutely impossible for both of us to communicate through that mental divide. And the worst part of this is that his religious sentiments are not even of the refined type (the type you'd often find expressed by say a Dostoyevskian character), but more or less in agreement with what you're likely to encounter almost everywhere among average Nigerians (he'll happily endorse my professor's conclusion about the cause of homosexuality and probably even go further). For instance, my dad recently had a health challenge with prostate enlargement and my brother's first go-to explanation was that it must be a spiritual attack. Yes, that's the kind of person he is. Hence, he is unique in his worldly accomplishments but not in his worldview and reality-processing style from the majority of Nigerians or Africans for that matter.

And this is the crux of the matter: his type is well delineated in Nigeria. There are other well-known individuals like my brother and what they have in common is this: a brain that is incredibly academically fit for purpose (but struggles to accept the scientific philosophy that underlies Western-type education), a temperament that is highly oriented towards the supernatural or the metaphysical, a character that is almost irreproachable in its self-righteousness, and a leadership capacity that's formidable in its parochial convictions. This human type is the single most pervasive and ascendant category most predictive of and associated with what counts as the most important kind of success in Nigeria: religio-spiritual success.

To mention a few notable names that epitomize this type; Pastor Enoch Adeboye, Bishop David Oyedepo, Pastor Williams Kumuyi, Pastor Daniel Olukoya, and Rev Chris Oyakhilome. What do these men have in common? They directly preside over the largest share (perhaps up to 50%) of the total Pentecostal Christian population in Nigeria and almost every other Pentecostal leader and Christian indirectly looks up to them. In addition, some of these men are also renowned for their almost unrivalled academic achievements. Pastor Adeboye was an accomplished mathematician and on his way to becoming the youngest professor of the subject in Nigeria before he took over the mantle of leadership from the original founder of RCCG. Pastor Olukoya was also a scientist and a professor - he is said to be the first Nigerian scientist to clone genes. I think the same is true of Kumuyi, he attended two of the best universities in Nigeria in their hay days and has a postgraduate degree. Bishop Oyedepo has a PhD in Human Development from Honolulu University and was named by Forbes in 2011 as the richest pastor in Nigeria. These are men who could have conveniently made a name for themselves in the secular world in their respective chosen fields but perhaps not to the same degree of success they've achieved in the religious sphere.

There's a natural alignment between their particular strengths and the prevailing worldview within the culture they belong to which makes their success seamless compared to what someone who's trying to fight for cultural emancipation (think Obafemi Awolowo, Tai Solarin, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, or Dele Farotimi) would have ever achieved. All of them have a global reach that's almost unmatched by any other category of Nigerians and Africans. One way to identify what a people care about the most is by looking at its most celebrated individuals within its own shores. No other cultural types in Nigeria can rival the cultural power and influence wielded by the Pentecostal heavyweights, not even her politicians or celebrities, and certainly not her intellectuals. Ironically, even her politicians, celebrities, and academics have their own spiritual daddies and mummies. I believe that this is one of the most fundamental tragedies of the African question.

Why is this a tragedy? Because I believe these men, these paradoxical intellectuals of religious persuasion, seriously have what it takes to lead Nigeria out of poverty and backwardness. In their respective ecclesiastical jurisdictions, they run organizations that are incredibly effective compared to what you observe in the general society. Oyedepo established two big universities one of which has overtaken all of the prestigious and old public universities in world rankings. Adeboye's religious headquarters, known as Redemption Camp, is a residential haven for even nonreligious people because of almost zero crime and uninterrupted power and water supply (something you would hardly find anywhere else in Nigeria). And the same is true for all the other names and a few others I might have omitted when it comes to how they lead and organize their respective movement. But one legitimate and powerful criticism that could be levelled against these indigenous Pentecostal giants is that all of them, without exception, built their successes around the force of their personality. Hence you expect a quick progressive decline once they're no longer around as happened in the case of Benson Idahosa (the first indigenous Pentecostal firebrand to truly go global) and has recently happened with the spiritual estate of the infamous TB Joshua.¹

You see, in Nigeria, and maybe Africa by extension, our best specimens are somehow more naturally inclined to embrace the supernatural worldview and attitude as opposed to the scientific one. I don't know why beyond what I've speculated: that it seems to be our default setting or perhaps it's a reflection of our stage of cultural evolution(?). And it seems to have less to do with IQ as it's a metaphysical outlook that's as dominant among the educated elites as it is among the common man. Consequently, the political leadership space is vacated for the worst elements to occupy. This is a country that produced Wole Soyinka (a Nobel laureate in literature), Chinua Achebe (the writer of Things Fall Apart), Chimamanda Adiche (a world celebrated literary genius), Fela Kuti (the revolutionary musical genius who created the Afro beat), and Obafemi Awolowo (a State man per excellence whose revolutionary achievements in old Western Nigeria of the independence era has not been remotely matched till today). But each of these individuals are anomalies rather than the norm. They emerged in spite of their country of origin and not because of it.

Another certainly interesting thing anyone familiar with the above names would notice is that, except for Awolowo, they all belong to the same branch of achievement - art and humanities (that's usually the one domain of achievement that you’d often find most globally celebrated names from Africa). Notwithstanding their superior global stature, there's no doubt that those names, again, bar Awolowo, still significantly pale in cultural recognition, relevance, and acceptance compared to the Pentecostal giants. In fact, these secular Galactico were perpetually persecuted and smeared not least by the government (military or pseudodemocratic, even Awolowo would later spend a few years in prison), but equally held in little esteem by most Nigerians as against being regarded as national treasures. It’s often almost always an unfailing litmus test that the finest individuals to have ever emerged from Nigeria are invariably persecuted and hounded by the government in power and equally undervalued by the largest proportion of her citizens.

And so back to my brother... and you already see that the pattern continues with the next generation positioned to take over leadership. A gifted mind, a natural leader, a solid character, a stable temperament all in service of a worldview that holds captive rather than set free. And because his type shares the same worldview with the political type, they're often in sync when it comes to their prescription for what ails Nigeria and its remedy: a divine intervention and spiritual awakening. And here's the first hint of the greatest challenge to the question posed by Apple Pie: he is thinking in terms of the classic law of cause and effect - you sow something, you patiently nurture it through the seasons and reap exactly what you sowed. How do you apply this materially lawful principle and mechanistic albeit effective thinking to a people who overwhelmingly believe in divine intervention and miracles, including its most enlightened elites? My belief is that far-reaching and most consequential society-wide transformation can only take hold when initiated from the top, that is by a legitimate coalition of elites. These are the people who dictate what matters, set the agenda, allocate resources, and have both the material and political means to drive these agenda. But the existing crop of elites is irredeemably compromised. I’ll soon address one possible way I think this can be circumvented.

As I see it, the problem will be far simpler if Africa's challenge is primarily about corruption and bad leadership. No, at the most fundamental level, it's not that at all. It's far deeper and more serious than that. I am of the opinion that black Africa possesses one of the worst cultural phenotypes in the world. And behind every phenotype is a collection of disparate genes that interact with the environment to perpetuate its expression through cultural transmission. But when the randomly ascendant elite and leadership class is not much different from the lowest class of citizens in terms of reality perception and information processing, there isn't just enough within-population variance in metaphysical orientation to allow for a distinctive class of leaders to evolve by natural random processes any time soon.

Personality is a bigger factor than IQ in economic development gap among nations

Before I attempt to answer Apple Pie's ten-million-dollar question, there's one last thing I'd like to say about the perceived cognitive and material gap between the cultural West and black Africa. I know it's even more difficult to measure average personality of a whole population of people than their average IQ. But this is exactly what I want to speculate about in this section. I suspect very strongly that by far the biggest difference between Europeans and black Africans is in the most dominant (modal) personality tendencies of their average citizens. I know some people would object to my using the idiographic concept of personality instead of culture. But I prefer to use ‘personality’ precisely because I'm not thinking of culture per se, but personality types aggregated according to their frequency of occurrence among a culturally or racially similar people. People make cultures before cultures remake people. It's a well-established empirical fact that when it comes to individual achievements, personality, specifically certain personality traits, is indispensable. This is why graveyards are filled with failed individuals with high IQs but zero achievements. Likewise, when it comes to success as a group, the aggregate personality traits of the group matter a great deal. Here’s how I put it in another Substack post which I strongly recommend if you are curious to know more about how I view the average Nigerian character:

The citizens who most approximate the national or cultural stereotypes of their country or group are the ones most likely to be successful in that specific environment.

In the referenced article, which should be viewed as a kind of earnest parody, here is how I characterized the personality of the collection of humans that occupy the geopolitical space known as Nigeria:

Likewise, humans, the cultural organism not the biological one, are defined by the values they promote and serve. These values come to set them apart from other groups of humans and come to define their cultural identity. From this cultural identity, their behaviors become discernible and meaningful even if disapproved of by other human groups. Because these cultural values are often stable (though they can also very easily undergo a radical change by artificially imposed means) so are the behaviors they stipulate. Hence the irresistible and often correct impulse to stereotype the external other.

To illustrate this idea further and to link it to the specific subject of this essay: if my foggy imagination is combined with my very limited media-based exposure (as I've never been outside Nigeria), I'd sketchily describe the USA as a spoilt entitled hedonist; Britain as an arrogant self-possessed aristocrat; Russia as a self-righteous superstitious idealist; China as a laid-back inventive and ambitious introvert (I think this applies to Japan as well but I'd add ‘repressed’ to the list of adjectives); India as a restless sexually repressed zealot. And finally, Nigeria, my own country, as a simpleminded impressionable wild child. Of course, these are broad anthropomorphized caricatures of a collective picture rather than of specific characters (and they may as well be absurd misrepresentations, but it won't detract from the larger point this speculative piece is about.

I had fun thinking up these descriptive personifications of whole peoples, but I can’t defend any of those characterizations except that of Nigeria of which I am an organic part. Tove K asks: “How does high intelligence manifest itself where you live?” I would flip this question by focusing on its obverse: how does low intelligence manifest itself? But here is the thing: both high and low intelligences manifest in similar ways across cultures. And what creates the illusion of cross-cultural distinctions are the different flavors of personality traits (writ large) and cultural values that dictate the kind of cultural activities that a people deem most worthy of intellectual investment and elevation. The only reason why an Einstein in the US will be different from an Einstein in Nigeria is the differences in the dominant tendencies and cultural practices between those two countries. An Einstein in Nigeria would probably die without leaving any cultural trace simply because there's no cultural selection for the kind of endeavor most suited for his particular talent. But today, the potential Einsteins of Nigeria and Africa now have the option of migrating to those cultures with centuries of experience selecting for the kind of norms and rituals that optimize their outrageous intellect. Hence, I believe that knowing about the average behavioral tendencies and values of a people would reveal more information about them than knowing about their average IQs.

So, what is an average Nigerian like? Here is how I described him/her in the same article mentioned above:

For example, if you were to pick a representative Nigerian at random, he/she is very likely to be more or less unruly (a disregard for decorum, rule, and order); unprincipled (a contempt for that which is formulaic, rigid, stable, in other words, a lack of regard for the systematic); merry-loving (an appetite for lavish ceremonies and displays of opulence); superstitious and religious (a belief in influences and phenomena outside and beyond the self and the physical realm); traditionist (a strong sentiment and attachment to old ways of thinking and doing); and anti-merit (resentment and hostility towards that which is independent, outstanding, and scientific). There are some small distinctions among the three dominant tribes (the Hausa/Fulanis, the Yorubas, and the Igbos) where these national stereotypes are concerned, but they're not significant enough to differentiate at the national level of observation. For instance, the Yorubas are the most notorious for merriment; the Hausa/Fulanis the most religious; and the Igbos the most unruly (in the sense that they're historically known to be relatively more difficult to lead and organize).

And an anonymous long-time former diplomat from a European Country, commenting on a different blogsite, would seem to perfectly share the view I expressed in that article:

“It used to occur to me that (Nigeria) society was configured in such a way as to make the most aggressive and objectionable individuals successful and able to negotiate their day, and to the rest who may be more mild mannered, tough luck. It’s also spectacularly ostentatious. I am not enough of a writer to sum this up to even my own satisfaction, but imagine the most wwwwooooooowwwwwwww OUT THERE extroverts you have ever known – that’s Nigeria. Or at least that’s urban Nigeria.”

To sum it up, the two personality traits that research has shown to be most correlated with achievement are conscientiousness and openness to ideas. Nigeria, if it were a single human entity, would rank at the very lowest end of the spectrum on both traits. And when the clusters of behavioral tendencies we conceptualize as conscientiousness and openness are in deficit in any individual, the personality that results is likely to be of the Antisocial and Dependent types. And trust me, those types are abundant in Nigeria and Nigeria as a country (and sub-Saharan Africa at large) is a notoriously unruly and dependent state. Please keep this fact in mind as I next attempt to engage the what-to-do challenge posed by Apple Pie.

So what to do with Apple Pie’s hypothetical $10,000,000?

Like I said, none of the regular stuff suggested by Apple Pie would work in a space like Nigeria. None of what has worked in other countries would work in Nigeria due to a lot of factors some of which, I hope, I've tried to highlight in this essay. But in a nutshell, the main reason they won't work is because of the quality and array of the dominant actors. The combined IQ of the dominant political and civil service actors is probably less than 80 because they’re not rigorously selected. The dominant actors are almost always possessed with tribal, religious, or some other exclusive in-group loyalties. The dominant actors are incredibly motivated by a crass appetite for relentless material acquisition. The dominant actors overwhelmingly process reality through the supernatural lens. The dominant actors are prominently low in personality traits conscientiousness and openness while prominently high in extraversion, religiosity, and dishonesty. With the will, might, and foresight of the right actors, one can grow a Greenland in the desert, and with the wrong actors even a land flowing with milk and honey would be dry. Dubai is flourishing, Nigerians are starving right in the middle of an endless fertile expanse of arable land. One does not need an oracle to know that the problem can't be the environment, it can't be the US hegemony, it can't be the transatlantic slave trade, it can't be the forces of evil. The most likely candidate is the collective human factor.

So, what would I do if I had ten million dollars? It's simple: A Charter City. And this is not my idea by any means. The idea was first brought to public attention in 2009 by Paul Romer, but has since gained traction among many academics, thinktanks, and development experts concerned with the persistent problem of third-world socioeconomic stasis. It's important I state that I have a substantially different idea as to how Charter Cities should be implemented anywhere in the third world in order to avoid many of the controversies and shortcomings that have characterized almost every attempt to realize it in those places where they are most needed. However, this article has already exceeded its intended length. So, I'll reserve it for another time.

In Conclusion, the chronic developmental challenges of Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa at large are due less to deficits in hard cognitive abilities and more to the even less quantifiable factors like reality-processing, cultural values, average dominant personality tendencies, and leadership selection processes. A Charter City or a Charter Town or a Charter Local Council offers the most realistic pathway to bypass these culture-ingrained limitations, allowing for the deliberate selection of the best citizens in partnership with trusted outsiders to come to the fore of leadership responsibilities.

1. In spite of the solid evidence provided to support the allegations of atrocities committed by TB Joshua, majority of Nigerians still defended him.