In 1787, James Madison sat down to write about the thing that destroys republics. He did not call it corruption, though it is that. He did not call it tribalism, though it is that too. He called it faction. And he defined it with a precision that cuts across centuries and continents.

A faction, Madison wrote, is a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Read that again. Slowly. Now replace citizens with Nigerians. Replace community with Nigeria. Does it not describe exactly what we see? Groups united not by shared vision but by shared interest. Passion that overrides reason. The rights of others sacrificed to the appetites of the few.

Madison asked the question that every diverse nation must ask: how do you cure the mischiefs of faction? He saw two options. The first: destroy the liberty that allows factions to form. The second: give every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, the same interests.

The first, he said, was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire — an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second was impossible. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.

So faction cannot be prevented. It can only be controlled. And the way to control it, Madison argued, is not to suppress difference but to multiply it. The larger the republic, the greater the variety of parties and interests, the harder it becomes for any single faction to dominate.

This is the argument for Nigeria's size. Not that we are too big, too diverse, too fractured — but that our diversity, if properly governed, is our protection. The more groups there are, the harder it is for any one group to oppress the rest. The more voices there are, the harder it is for any one voice to drown out all others.

But Madison added a warning that we have not heeded: enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. He knew that the system must be designed not for the best leaders but for the worst. Not for angels but for men. And the system must make it impossible for any man, however powerful, to become the faction himself.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

We are not angels. We have never been. The question is whether we can build a system that accounts for that — a system where power checks power, where ambition counteracts ambition, where no one man and no one group can capture the state and call it theirs.

Madison believed it was possible. He called it a republic. We call it Nigeria. The question is whether we mean it.