The name Calabar was bestowed on the capital of Nigeria’s south-eastern state by Portuguese explorers, says Joseph Ushie, a tour guide, as his car purrs along the smoothly-paved streets of the spacious, equilateral town. Today, he says, it has been turned into a marketing acronym: “Come And Live And Be At Rest”.

It is hard to conceive of any foreign visitor coming to Nigeria with such ambitions, infamous as the country is for its pushiness and dysfunctionality, its crime and shoulder-shrugging familiarity with man-made disaster.