It is a pity that an unimaginative and disconnected political elite wedded to obscene privileges and driven by decadent instinct of primitive accumulation has by reckless acts of omission and commission watered the ground on which the ordinary Nigerians are drenched in their own blood.

The latest bloody outrage allegedly perpetrated by the Boko Haram sect has drawn the usual hollow platitudes by the political elite. From the President, the Senate president, governors and other top managers of the Nigeria project have all been affirming their brand of nationalist fervour largely issuing from entrenched privileges, where they are desperate to preserve Nigeria, but would care less what happens to Nigerians.

There is virtually no other state in the world that functions as a casino machine, where state managers live in unfathomable opulence. For a state that functions in this manner, it is not so much a crises of governance that plagues Nigeria, than that the crises of the state itself.

Even though that the Nigerian ruling elite is bedevilled with governance challenges, they are more afflicted with the deficiency of vision and imagination to appreciate and apprehend the deeper crises of structural malfunction and institutional malady. The Boko Haram challenge with other manifestation of structural malady like the Niger-Delta insurgency, OPC and MASSOB challenge have been long in gestation.

Whle these challenges boldly hit out on the thin and fragile structure of the country, the political establishment is totally  bereft of insight into the critical political content of the infraction, reducing it to mere security challenge with soldiers and police unleashed on the streets to contain it.

The same narrow minded approach was evident in the current government agenda, with a large chunk of the 2012 budget devoted to security. Only some few years ago, the government  believed and told Nigerians that when once, the insurgency of the Niger-Delta militants is contained, the secessionist threats of MASSOB and OPC are winded down , Nigeria will step into bliss.

The truth is that Boko Haram others before it, are objective  manifestation of acutely deficient political process afflicted with structural disequilibrium and institutional malfunction. If Boko Haramtoday as we know it today did not exist, something even more venal would have filled the yawning vacuum of the stark national question.

Objectively, no routine issues of governance including security can be resolved without serious attempt to resolve the national question

Paradoxically, the ruling political elite which has been in denial of the national question that is now been posed in bombs and blood are rumour mongering if Nigeria is about to enter the Lebanon’s style sectarian strife and war. Even when the tokenistic and reductionist security operation is proving less effective in containing the escalating violence, there is still no new thinking in the air.

The simple reason is that any constructive and meaningful therapy to the current growing bloody disorder is likely to whittle the existing privileges of the elite as a trade-off and they do not want to contemplate it. It is essentially the recalcitrance of the ruling elite to concede that the existing structural and institutional frame work has come a full circle, that it only feeds and nourishes the current state of anomie disorder.

The critical national question is simply that multi-ethnic and multi- religious society must through a modest consensus, device measures defined in varying institutions and structures to accommodate the multi-national identities while consciously building transnational ones to which all will commonly identify.

Neither the existing structures of government, either Federal, state nor does local government approximate to a consensus device. While in objective terms, the current structure of government could be alien to indigenous legitimacy, the conduct of personals in government approximates to banditry in indigenous environment and perspective.

From this perspective, good governance is a pipe dream with an unreconstructed state where the state engages in the same purposes for which it was same created by the alien invaders, the different actors over a different time, notwithstanding.

The first republic crises evidently posed the national question, soon after independence, but the military coup and rule that followed, blunted the sharpened question. The military- imposed answer to the question further distorted it.

It was inevitable that governance would decline to its current stage and it is even certain that economic well-being of Nigerians would deteriorate leading to critical anti-social behaviour where the country would be brought under mortal threat as the current situation.

But the answer is not the heavy-handed security measures that have not under the current circumstance produce any positive result. What the situation requires is that Nigeria must be recreated through popular consultation leading to a new constitutional framework that recognises the true diversity of the Nigerian project.

A genuine federal structure would give the Boko Haram sect, the political and legitimate ambience to test their vision of Islamic community within their acclaimed constituency. Even the MASSOB, OPC, and the Niger-Delta insurgents would have ample political framework to find out how many Ndigbo, Yoruba or Ijaw share in their puritan vision of enclave politics. I am sure they would be deflated, while the Nigerian project would be exorcised of the terminal paranoid of an elite, wedded to private privileges.

While the various ethnic nationality group would have sufficient political windows to ventilate, articulate and robustly engage their potentials and possibilities they will equally appreciate the wider space offered in the larger Nigeria context to mingle and maximize the social returns accruable in a broader social and economic space.

The vehicle to a Nigeria of social and political inclusion must take off from the high way of open consultation. The Nigeria state and its elite handlers as currently exist and operate is the main distortion of the Nigerian society and its evolution to a viable national enterprises. Lacking in basic competence of a modern state, its response to critical challenges is both knee_jerk and paranoid.

Internally weak, because most of its operators and key actors bend its publicly defined purpose to ulterior and mundane art of personal aggrandizement, the Nigeria state withers_away in its egregious paradox where its levers of  authority is used to privately perpetrate the vices which it repudiates publicly. No Nigeria official behaves like a loyal servant of the state.

It is the criminalization of the state organs by its very managers that discredits the state in popular consciousness. The behaviours of key state actors in undermining the credibility of the state derive from its dysfunctional structures and atrophied institution.

The increased violence that threatens to tear down the fabric of the country’s fragile existence should sound a wake_up call that something fundamental needed to be done. But the political elite are all scampering for the routine platitudes.

They are afflicted by the twin deficiencies of vision and sense of history. Remaining in public office with the huge and unimaginable comfort it brings, have blighted any perception that the country cannot simply wobble along. The common refrain in every key political actor is the need for peace, as if peace is equipment, you just install and it fits in.

They actually want the peace of the grave yard, where they are not disturbed in the routine business of brigandage and plunder. Peace is simply a consequence of certain activities. It is neither invoked nor convoked but is brought by certain categorical form of activities. Nigeria stands at a crossroads, and no exhortations, no matter how well_meaning are capable of pulling her back from the brink. Only bold actions bordering on fundamental tinkering of the body_politic will provide any opportunity to climb back from the brink.

CHARLES ONUNAIJU, a journalist, wrote from Abuja.