Public debate about Nigeria's future has grown increasingly crowded with competing prescriptions. Two of such remedies dominate the discourse: the demand for outright dissolution and the call for a Sovereign National Conference. Both are emotionally and politically potent. Neither is constitutionally valid, logically sustainable, nor practically persuasive. More critically, they distract from the real challenge; and, tellingly, from the people most responsible for the situation – the elite. Nigeria is now heavily under strain because its elites have repeatedly refused to finish the arduous work of negotiating it.