Rethinking the business model ought to have been more central to Buhari than the rather inherently complicated anti-corruption war. Market forces hasn’t worked in Nigeria. Unbridled capitalism has broken down in the country simply because it has enriched too few persons at the expense of the vast majority. This was the message in the turn out for Buhari during the campaigns. Those turn outs can only be understood as popular cry against the greed, jealousy, hypocrisy, mendacity and the satanic dispositions that define politics today, reducing the entire society to the lowest level of virtue and nobility as the mundane has become superior to high mindedness and our democracy is not for development but for show.

The turn-outs were in response to these material and discursive manifestations of the clever interpretation of a straight forward concept such as deregulation to mean the auctioning of State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), instead of the welcome opening of the market for competition by all actors. Instead of that, those with agenda pushed a clever argument that the level of corruption was such that government companies could not make profit. Now, they have sold SOEs as scraps mostly to themselves or cronies but with nothing to show in terms of what we did with the proceeds.

We lost on all counts because it is not as if we gained in terms of efficiency either which is what privatisation is about. If you privatise and your goods and services are such that they cannot compete against the Chinese, for example, and you are still talking of the market economy, then what sort of political economist are you? We also lost in the utter lack of a thought for the binding roles these SOEs performed, linking different parts of the country to commonly owned assets such as NEPA, NITEL, the NNPC outlay and so on. And, in most cases, it was done shabbily, such as selling Nigeria Airways not to a Dangote but a foreign concern, something that the Americans would look left, right, left and right again before ever doing, even up to this moment.

Here, we went on a flagrant violation of the constitution whose Chapter Two forbids concentration of wealth in few hands. Without even the decency of amending that provision, the share holders organised a bazaar. The result is that today, this is not an economy but wealth that is not anchored on production-speculation. Such is a calamity for any society and we can see in the emerging situation whereby even those who accumulated cannot defend themselves against movements of rage. It is becoming clear that if we do not redistribute, natural law will intervene and do it. And that could be quite unpleasant for everyone as we all experienced under Boko Haram.

So, all the problems that Buhari has prioritised: security, corruption and unemployment derive their origin and character from the business model in the last instance. And the way out might be to retouch the business model. We see the workability of such a strategy in what is going on in the banks and the financial sector just because the government has tightened control of its finances/accounts. Suddenly, the great myth of superlative capabilities bestowed on private enterprise in the past three decades in Nigeria are nowhere to be seen. Retouching the model creatively might, therefore, be what is folding. That is an attempt to reorder the economy from speculation and its associated rottenness to a more guided capitalism as is the case everywhere else in the world. For whatever reasons, the government has not been given that direction the critical celebration it deserves.

What these interesting but still unclear developments in exercise of state power show is how limited the ethnic prism can be in fruitfully analysing some of them. I must, however, stop now before someone labels me a defender of the indefensible. In our country, no one is above being seen as a defender or an attacker. Of course, we are the loser because as such, we keep encountering the same problems all the time and opportunistically shifting our position as we do. Today, we are attackers of lopsided appointments forgetting conveniently that it wasn’t much different yesterday when we were the defenders. Come on!