This last weekend, America turned two hundred and fifty years as an independent nation. Fireworks marked success and survival, but  also the triumph of careful design. The framers gave their nation a blueprint, "in order to form a more perfect union".  The blueprint has guided every generation of American leaders since; and they have lived up to it, however imperfectly. Alexander Hamilton and his fellow authors of the Federalist Papers theorised a republic first, then built one, leaving behind a text every leader since has had to reckon with, refine, or rail against. Nigeria has no such anniversary of its own thinking to mark.