Burundi’s embattled President Pierre Nkurunziza is clutching at straws. By Friday evening reports were circulating on social media that he is finally "willing to negotiate and wants immunity after leaving office.” He is probably several months tardy but it is never too late to do the right thing. Or, is it? 

It will be hard to convince moral absolutists that this man can just wake up, decide that he has killed enough people and expect that he could get off scot-free. Hold him accountable, they will say. No amnesty for a pathological killer.

Then there will be moral relativists who will say that the deal provides the best guarantee against any further bloodshed. Let’s hold our collective nose and sign the damn thing, put an end to the whole saga if it will bring us peace, they will say. Grant the gangster amnesty, lest he decides to go down with Burundi.

Both sides are right. One is more right than the other, however. Military strategists will tell you that a good commander must always leave an escape route four a surrounded enemy. You do not want to face a desperate enemy because, fighting for his dear life, he will dig in and inflict unnecessary casualties that may end up undermining force morale.

Nkurunziza is surrounded and in need of an escape route. By foregoing the urge to inflict fatal harm, Burundians can start to think about a post-Nkurunziza future, and the promises it will offer.

First in their mind should be how to avoid another false start. I’m sorry I have to break it to them but the Arusha accord was a false start despite the praises it received. It represented, and continues to represent, a wrong diagnosis of the problem that the country was facing at the time. It, therefore, cannot be relied upon to provide the antidote for what ails that society.

A faulty diagnosis must lead to a wrong antidote. The violation of the Arusha accord was only a catalyst for the underlying problem that it failed to address. And this is where our elites often lose the plot: too often they focus on the trees and ignore the forest.

Asked to identify the fundamental problem that ails their society, that country’s elite, gathered in Arusha during the negotiations and claiming to be the representatives of their people, reasoned that it was the failure to share power between the Hutu and the Tutsi.

And so, the mediators helped them to hammer out an agreement on how the two groups could share power.

They proposed, and the Burundians agreed to, the so-called 60/40 solution. For every ten positions in the public sector six would go to a Hutu and four to a Tutsi. The army would be shared half and half, and so on.

The Hutu and Tutsi. These are the trees, ladies and gentlemen. Focusing on them is a logic that treats Burundi as if it is made up of ethnic Bantustans. As if it has no citizens. Citizenship is a collective that is indivisible.

Belgian colonial administrators, keen on measuring nose lengths and the like, would have been so proud of their black ancestral elite. Enter Peter Nkurunziza, the prodigal son, with his Bible in one hand, sword in the other.

When Burundians rejected his quest for a third term and found himself cornered, he told them that he was not the problem. That the real problem that the country was facing was the Tutsi who constitute only 15 per cent of the population are reserved 40 per cent of government posts and half in the army. He, therefore, needed more time in power in order to ‘correct’ this mistake made in Arusha.

Then, as now, Burundi’s problem is not the Tutsi or the Hutu – they never were and never will be. Citizens of a republic can never be its problem. Instead, they are its solution, for good or for worse. Indeed, the logic that accepts a country’s citizen to be a problem is colonial and ultimately genocidal.

Consequently, any solution that divided the country along ethnic fault lines was always going to keep the country in crisis. Moreover, an elite worth their salt ought to have had the foresight to distinguish the trees from the forest.

What Burundi needs from its elite is for them to start thinking about how to build meaningful citizenship among its people. It needs them to jealously protect this single thought, which they can do by promoting positive discourse around it while undermining ideologies that seek to bastardise their people. It also needs them to articulate legal, policy, and institutional means to enforce this vision.

The alternative reproduces tragedy. It’s the path in the gutter of the politics of "tura tugabane niwanga bimeneke” (either we share or we destroy everything) that has underpinned Burundi’s lost decade, and points to Nkurunziza’s intransigence as chickens coming home to roost.

Burundi’s fundamental problem is that its elites gave undue weight to the things that divide their society, which helped to institutionalise differences. A new post-Nkurunziza society must give due premium to the things that unite Burundians. Indeed, if something close to the energy that was used to tear things apart can be marshalled in this direction, they will have institutionalised commonality.

It’s never too late to do the right thing.