Julius was angry and miserable about his mother banning him from seeing Duke, but it was hard not to feel some pride as he watched her work the room.

Bunmi was the daughter of an army colonel, a big man in a village where most families laboured on cocoa plantations. She began selling textiles around local villages when she was in her mid-teens. At the time, fabrics used for traditional Yórùba clothing were made locally, and cheaper imported fabrics were banned.

Bunmi used her father’s military connections to set up a smuggling operation, using Nigerian Army trucks to bring Chinese fabric from neighbouring Cameroon. Cheap smuggled fabric turned Bunmi into one of the biggest cloth distributors in southern Nigeria and she used a chunk of her profits to buy an abandoned cinema and turn it into the slickly marketed Healing Prayer Church (HPC).

HPC hired handsome men to preach an upbeat mix of Christianity, with some superstition thrown in. The community promised wealth and success, especially if you purchased Hot Prayer books and necklaces, paid a priest to bless your home or bought sacred charms for your car, sports team or your child’s school backpack.

HPC now had eleven worship centres, Nigeria’s second most popular religious radio station and three services per week on government TV channels that were constitutionally banned from religious programming.

After business and religion, Bunmi decided to conquer politics. But a physically overbearing, never-married female, who’d fathered four sons by three different fathers, made an awkward political candidate. Instead, she groomed her youngest brother, SJ. First winning a term in the state assembly, then deposing two-term state governor Rotimi Rotimi.

Julius saw that his family was being herded by Teddy Mac, the Chicago-born political technologist who ran his uncle’s political campaigns. Teddy’s ink-blue suit and pointy shoes contrasted with the looser local styles, while his zippy can-do attitude and grind-you-down persistence got under Julius’s skin.

‘Someone’s been growing,’ Teddy said cheerfully, eyeing Julius’s cuffs. ‘Where’s your cute little brother? He has to be in the pictures.’

Gabe was located, with ketchup on his tie. As Orisa rushed him to a bathroom to sponge it off, Julius followed a gaggle of uncles and cousins out of the ballroom and onto sweeping marble steps in front of the mansion.

Most Nigerian voters agreed that a successful person should look after their extended family, so photographs of political candidates surrounded by prosperous-looking relatives featured in every campaign. Voters awarded bonus points if the entourage included sweet kids and grey-haired grandmas. Gold jewellery and designer clothing were also popular, but never to be overdone, in case voters thought you’d skimmed too much from the state coffers.