Windsor Castle. £746 million. And a gap in the schedule nobody mentions.

This one is more complicated than it looks.

The state visit is real and it matters. Tinubu arrives in London today for a two-day visit — the first by a Nigerian president since Ibrahim Babangida in 1989. He'll meet King Charles at Windsor Castle, sit with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at Downing Street, and witness the signing of a £746 million deal between UK Export Finance and the Nigerian Ports Authority to refurbish Apapa Quays and Tin Can Island Port. That's Lagos's two main ports. Things that are physically falling apart and affecting every business that imports anything through them.

So there's substance here. Over 270,000 Nigerians live in the UK. The partnership covers trade, defence, migration, and people-to-people links. This isn't just ceremony.

But read the UK's own parliamentary briefing one paragraph further and you hit something interesting. MPs raised concerns about attacks on Christians in Nigeria in January 2026. The UK knows what's happening in Borno. The UK knows what the military is and isn't doing. None of that gets said at Windsor.

What gets said at Windsor is that Nigeria is "open for business" — a line the presidency has already used in its briefings. Meanwhile, 23 Nigerians died at a market bus stop yesterday while the president packed for London.

Both things are true. The ceremony is real. The gap between the ceremony and the country is also real. That's the story.