The two clerics were in London to attend an Islamic conference and squeezed in leisure and tourism into their itinerary. Their touristic adventures in the British capital, which, in the rhetoric of many puritan clerics, is a bastion of an immoral modernity, Western education, and cultural trends antithetical to righteous Muslim living, surprised many Northern Nigerian Muslims.

There’s an assumption that despite multiple deprivations, Nigerians can ‘take solace in the knowledge’ that they have democracy, writes Moses Ochonu. But the kind of democracy practised by Abuja has delivered neither improved standards of living nor abstract benefits such as press freedom or human rights, instead providing the perfect cover for ‘massive corruption’, says Ochonu. It is ‘not what Nigerians signed up for in 1999; if we do not act urgently, it will consume us all,’ Ochonu warns.