Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, is as far from Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub, as Berlin is from Athens. But whereas a round-trip ticket for the three-hour flight from the German capital to the Greek one can be had for around €150 ($173), getting from Lagos to Freetown took your correspondent two flights, a ferry and almost $2,000. The trip included a seven-hour layover in Ghana and required changing from a Nigerian to a Togolese airline. The cheaper option, albeit longer by 20 hours, would have been to fly across the continent to Ethiopia before taking another plane west towards Sierra Leone.