There it was even worse. The queues were enormous, interlocking and unmoving. I picked one of the lines at random and joined it. As on the plane, there were a handful of white people - aid workers and diplomats, I guessed - but the rest were Nigerian. All around me, conversations were being held, sometimes in local dialects but mainly in pidgin English, which Pritchard’s dossier had told me was the lingua franca. I spent a few minutes tuning in, managing to pick out words here and there, accustoming myself to the tones in which it was used. It seemed an exuberant, rich language, a world away from the Pritchards and Osbornes of the world. The clothing was a mixture of African and Western, but there was exuberance in that, too. Businessmen in Western-style suits clutched important-looking briefcases, while matronly women in multi-coloured loose-fitting dresses sported thin Cartier watches. Soldiers wandered between the lines, looking over passengers and prodding their rifles into bags. They were young and arrogant, and just the look of them brought the reality of the situation home more than the endless statistics and prolix phrases of Pritchard’s report. Something about them chilled the bones.

They seemed just as interested in me. Within less than ten minutes of my entering the hall, a pattern of surveillance had closed in around me: two by the gates, one by the toilets, and a small, neat-looking man in a beret operating them with nods from next to the telephones. There was nothing I could do about it. I was a journalist, and any move I made would only make things worse. They had probably marked me out because I was a white man they didn’t recognize - the aid workers they would know. It was normal. Relax.

It was getting on eleven by the time I made it to the front of the queue. The clerk had a long, narrow face and thick glasses. Behind him was draped the country’s flag - vertical strips of green, white and green. He picked up my passport and started to leaf through it slowly. I wasn’t worried - the document had been made in precisely the same way as if it had been genuine. He stopped at the back page.

‘Press?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He looked troubled at this. He leaned down and took some papers from a drawer, then placed them in front of him and started reading, tracing the miniature lines of text with a finger. I had a mounting sense of unease. Had Dobson let me down? Surely my accreditation had come through?

The clerk suddenly glanced up at me, a pained expression on his face.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked. ‘What’s the—’