Nigeria, April 19 -- I spent the week in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, making two presentations and engaging the academic community in broad debates on the crises facing Nigeria and West Africa. My first presentation was on setting eleven benchmarks for enhancing security and national unity. The Nigerian state is undergoing a three-dimensional crisis. The first one affects the political economy and it is generated mainly by public corruption, which over the past four decades has created a run on the treasury at the national and state levels, threatening to consume the goose that lays the golden egg.

The second one is the crisis of citizenship symbolised by ethno-regionalism, the Boko Haram insurgency, farmer-herder killings, agitations...