By VICTOR-BANDELE DADA
Politics has evolved into one of the largest businesses of the modern age, commanding enormous financial flows, institutional attention and popular emotion. Yet, despite its scale and spectacle, political power repeatedly fails to deliver durable prosperity, social harmony, or ecological balance. My argument is that the persistent wastage of political power arises from a fundamental absence: sustainability intelligence. Beyond ideology, party structures, or electoral cycles lies a deeper organising principle that governs enduring systems in nature and successful human institutions. By interrogating politics as big business, exposing the illusion of political omnipotence, and illustrating the consequences of governance without sustainability intelligence, this paper advances a post-political framework for human organisation, one that transcends politics without abolishing it.
Introduction
From ancient city-states to contemporary nation-states, politics has been humanity’s preferred instrument for collective decision-making. In the twenty-first century, however, politics has become more than governance; it is an industry. Campaign financing, lobbying, media influence, bureaucratic expansion, and geopolitical manoeuvring together constitute a multi-trillion-dollar global enterprise. Paradoxically, this expansion coincides with deepening crises: economic inequality, environmental degradation, social fragmentation, and recurrent conflict. The contradiction suggests not a shortage of political effort, but a deficiency in the intelligence guiding political action.
Politics as Big Business
Modern politics operates with the logic of a commercial enterprise. Electoral contests resemble high-stakes investments, where donors expect measurable returns in policy influence, contracts, or regulatory advantage. Political offices function as revenue-generating platforms through salaries, perks, access to power networks, and post-office opportunities. Media cycles monetise outrage, while governance itself becomes a marketplace of competing interests.
This commercialisation reshapes political priorities. Short-term gains dominate long-term outcomes; optics eclipse substance; popularity substitutes for wisdom. Policies are crafted to win elections rather than to sustain societies. In this environment, political success is measured by votes secured and offices occupied, not by systems stabilised or futures secured. Politics thrives financially even as societies weaken structurally.
The Great Illusion of Political Power
At the heart of political excess lies a powerful illusion: the belief that political authority alone can engineer sustainable order. This illusion assumes that laws, decrees, budgets and coercive capacity are sufficient to organise complex human systems indefinitely. History repeatedly refutes this assumption. Empires with immense political power: from Rome to the Soviet Union, collapsed not for lack of authority, but for lack of systemic alignment with enduring principles of sustainability.
Political power is inherently transient. Leaders change, parties rotate, and policies reverse. Yet sustainability requires continuity across generations. The illusion persists because political systems conflate control with competence. Authority can compel compliance, but it cannot manufacture resilience. Without an intelligence framework that understands interdependence, feedback loops, resource regeneration, and social cohesion, political power becomes performative rather than productive.
Sustainability Intelligence as the Missing Variable
Sustainability intelligence refers to the capacity to organise human systems in harmony with universal principles of endurance observed in nature: self-organisation, balance, role differentiation, feedback regulation, and renewal. Natural systems persist for billions of years not through command-and-control politics, but through embedded intelligence that aligns function with context.
Human governance systems largely ignore this intelligence. Political decisions are often disconnected from ecological limits, cultural dynamics, and economic feedback mechanisms. As a result, policies generate unintended consequences: economic bubbles, social unrest, environmental collapse that require further political intervention, perpetuating a cycle of crisis management.
Wastage of Political Power Without Sustainability Intelligence
The absence of sustainability intelligence converts political power into waste. Financially, enormous public resources are consumed by projects that fail to deliver lasting value, white elephant infrastructures, unsustainable subsidies, and reactive social programmes. Institutionally, bureaucracies expand without corresponding improvements in outcomes. Socially, trust erodes as citizens observe the gap between political promises and lived realities.
Consider development planning that prioritises GDP growth without ecological accounting. Such policies may boost short-term indicators while undermining food security, public health, and environmental stability. Political power expended in this manner does not disappear; it accumulates as systemic debt: economic, social, and ecological. The result is governance that is busy but ineffective, powerful yet fragile.
Beyond Politics: A Post-Political Framework
To move beyond politics does not mean to abolish political institutions, but to reposition them within a higher-order intelligence system. Politics should become an instrument of sustainability intelligence rather than its substitute. This requires redefining governance success from electoral victories to systemic resilience; from authority concentration to role-based organization; from consumption-driven growth to regenerative prosperity.
In a post-political framework, leadership is evaluated by its ability to embed self-organizing mechanisms within society, economic structures that finance themselves, communities that regulate themselves, and institutions that learn and adapt. Political authority remains necessary, but it is constrained by sustainability metrics that reflect long-term viability rather than short-term popularity.
Conclusion
Politics, when elevated as humanity’s supreme organizing force, becomes an expensive illusion. As big business, it enriches systems of power while impoverishing the foundations of society. The persistent crises of the modern world are not failures of political will, but failures of political intelligence. Without sustainability intelligence, political power is wasted, consumed in cycles of control, conflict, and correction.
Beyond politics lies not anarchy, but a more mature civilization architecture, one grounded in universal principles of sustainability. Integrating sustainability intelligence into governance offers a path toward societies that endure, economies that regenerate, and politics that finally serves life rather than dominating it.
In this sense, this work stands consciously as a legacy of two luminary mentors whose intellectual guidance shaped its foundations: Emeritus Professor Isaac Ayinde Adalemo and Emeritus Professor Oyewusi Ibidapo-Obe. Through geography and systems engineering respectively, both scholars demonstrated that enduring human organization must be rooted in spatial order, functional roles, relational balance, and systemic intelligence rather than political expediency. Their lifelong scholarship affirmed that governance detached from sustainability principles is inherently unstable.
This article therefore extends their intellectual inheritance beyond the academy, reaffirming that the future of human organization will not be secured by political power alone, but by the deliberate alignment of governance with sustainability intelligence, a legacy worthy of preservation, application, and global transmission.
•Dr Dada, FRSA, CEO, DESI Consultants Ltd, wrote via: desicoin@gmail.com
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