[OPINION] Assessing the “Theory of Change of Location”

A short Hausa commentary shared and affirmed on Facebook by influencer Captain P’cross landed with a quiet thud that felt more like a drumbeat. He did not argue about earning enough to survive. He argued about wealth, about building real enterprises, about the kind of fortune that changes a lineage, and he said it rarely happens in the place where you were born.

I watched it, I felt it, and I shared it with a note of my own: “I can relate to this. It makes sense. Could you try something different today if things haven’t worked out well so far?” What he named so plainly is now circulating everywhere as a working intuition, sometimes dismissed as a myth, yet it behaves like every durable theory in science does, it begins with careful, repeated observation of how life actually unfolds.

Captain P’cross built his case on lived experience and on a question posed by a billionaire boss to his team. Name one person, the boss asked, who grew up in his own community, stayed there, and still built a major enterprise without leaving. Silence answered. From that silence came a simple proposition that now deserves a name.

The theory of change of location holds that financial and creative breakthroughs are more likely when a person moves to an environment where they were not raised, an environment that grants freedom from surveillance, distance from old scripts, and proximity to new collaborators who share the same ambition. It is not about running away. It is about relocating the self to a place where time, attention, and identity can be reassembled.

What makes this feel true is that it echoes ideas social scientists have been tracing for decades. Everett Lee’s push-pull theory of migration reminds us that people move not only to escape constraints at home but to be pulled toward opportunity, anonymity, and new networks elsewhere. Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, writing on social capital, showed how dense local ties can both support and suffocate, because the same relationships that offer help also demand favors, gossip, and conformity. When you step outside that web, the obligations thin and your hours thicken.

Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory adds another layer, autonomy, competence, and relatedness flourish best where you can choose your tasks and your company without the weight of who knew you at age ten. In that space, the mind stops performing for an audience and starts performing for a purpose.

I felt this first not in business but in boarding school. At home, study competed with visits, errands, festivals, and the soft pressure to be available. In the hostel, the only job was to become sharper. We studied at night, hunted down seniors in other hostels for past questions, taught ourselves ahead of the syllabus, and discovered that real learning came from repetition and curiosity, not from waiting for a teacher.

Researchers who have studied boarding environments note exactly this, the removal of domestic distractions concentrates time and builds habits of self-regulation that persist long after graduation. That is the gift of borrowed time, and change of location offers a version of it to adults too. Outside your familiar circle, evenings do not fill themselves. You choose what fills them.

There is also the quiet power of reinvention. In a new town, you are not locked into the old nickname, the old expectations, the old story about who overreads or who is too serious. Sociologists call this identity work, the chance to shed a habitus and try on a new one. That distance is uncomfortable at first, and that discomfort is useful. When you cannot knock on a cousin’s door for matches or for mercy, you learn humility, you learn to budget, you learn to ask better questions.

Challenge, as cognitive psychologists have long observed, sharpens problem solving far more than comfort does. The student who came from Lagos to Federal Polytechnic, Bida and copied every handout by hand because he had no money, then went to building or construction site in every free period and graduated best in class, was not just poor. He was under pressure that forced time management, comprehension through writing, and diversification of skill. The struggle paid tuition that ease never would.

We underestimate how much community life taxes ambition. At home, success is read as a communal resource. The trader in Rikkos who bought his landlord’s house after the Jos crisis did it because he lived like a ghost to everyone else, out before dawn, back near midnight, wearing few clothes, eating simply, saving in silence. Had he tried that in the midst of age mates and classmates, the savings would have become gossip, the discipline would have become a joke, and the money would have become a loan request.

A market trader once told me the same story from the other side. People will travel to buy from strangers who demand cash, then turn to friends and say, “debt us.” Insist on payment and you become the bad relative. Doing business inside the family orbit often means doing business under the weight of entitlement, and entitlement erodes both profit and relationship.

This pattern is not Nigerian, it is global. Look at any major city and you will find its commerce braided by outsiders. The tension behind xenophobic attacks in South Africa is a dark mirror of the same truth, migrants arrive, work longer, risk more, and build faster because they have fewer safety nets and fewer distractions. The same dynamic fuels “Japa.” Nigerians abroad face taxes, rent, and survival with no one to call for free food. That pressure forges resilience, time discipline, and focus. At home the calendar is crowded with rituals, birthdays, namings, weddings, ceremonies that are beautiful and necessary, yet they fragment attention. Abroad, work becomes the ritual, and the payoff is that time stops leaking.

I know this personally. I was once addicted to the chamber, those long visits with friends that swallowed whole afternoons. School and travel pulled me out, and at first it felt like loss. Missing Sallah in Bida while exams approached felt wrong until I asked a simpler question, what happens if I miss one festival and face the business that feeds me? That question only arises when you are detached enough to hear it. Change of location interrupts addiction, pattern, and inherited norms. It creates room for consistency, persistence, and perseverance, not because you are suddenly more virtuous, but because the environment stops rewarding the old version of you.

Thus, the change of location theory is not a rejection of home. It is a recognition of human nature. We are social, we are mimetic, we become what our surroundings rehearse. To build something large, you sometimes need a stage where the audience is smaller, the script is unwritten, and the clock belongs to you. That is why Captain P’cross’s short video resonated. It named what many have felt, that wealth often begins the moment you give yourself permission to leave, to be unknown for a while, and to work in peace.

Bagudu Mohammed is the Founder, Alternative Perspectives.

Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com

Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575