It all began rather innocuously in Abuja, Nigeria's capital. A private lawyer browsing through the November 16 weekend edition of ThisDay, one of Nigeria's most influential tabloids, stumbled on a comment piece written by Isioma Daniel, a 21-year-old features writer. Daniel had written on the controversies surrounding the upcoming Miss World contest in her country. "The Muslims thought it immoral to bring 92 women to Nigeria and ask them to revel in vanity," wrote Daniel, alluding to the resistance to the pageant from Nigeria's Muslim majority northern states. "What would Mohammed think? In all honesty, he would have probably chosen a wife from one of them."

This got the unidentified private lawyer's goat. So, on Monday, November 18, he put a call across to a Muslim cleric in Kaduna, the bustling cosmopolitan 'capital' of northern Nigeria. He pointed out to the "offending portions" in Daniel's report and advised the cleric on the need to institute legal proceedings against the tabloid. The cleric promised to consult "some people" and asked the lawyer to call him up two days later to finalise legal action against ThisDay.

What happened next was to set the stage for one more bloodbath in the troubled history of Africa's largest nation. The cleric decided going to the courts would be a long-drawn affair and began inciting his followers against the publication. Soon the word spread that a newspaper had written "something blasphemous" about Prophet Mohammed and it must be punished. An emir in one of the city's neighbourhoods also joined issue, hollering that the Miss World pageant was a "deliberate ploy of Christians to make a mockery of the holy month of Ramzan". In Kaduna, where the population is largely illiterate and religious violence is rife, the cleric and his flock's call inflamed passions in no time. On Wednesday, November 20, thousands of young men, including street urchins, poured on to the streets, marched to ThisDay's regional office and destroyed it. (The staff were lucky to escape in the nick of time.) Then they returned to the streets and split themselves into groups. Soon, Muslim and Christian gangs were trawling the city, murdering people of the opposite community and torching places of worship. Result: three days of religious rioting left some 250 people dead, 12,000 homeless, 22 churches and eight mosques destroyed and the pageant pulling out of Nigeria. And last weekend, the tensions simmered even as an Islamist state government in the north issued a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Daniel.

Clearly, Miss World was jinxed from the very beginning in Nigeria. (Nigeria was chosen to host this year's contest after Miss Nigeria Agbani Darego won last year's event in South Africa.) Half-a-dozen contestants had boycotted the show in protest against the decision by one of Nigeria's 12 Muslim majority northern states to order the stoning to death of Amina Lawal, an unmarried mother. (Assurances by the Nigerian government made 91 of the beauty queens finally land up.) The criticism of Lawal's sentencing drew the ire of some Islamic leaders who threatened to disrupt the show. One of them, the governor of Zamfara state in north-western Nigeria, Alhaji Sani Yerima, urged Muslims in the Nigerian government, particularly minister of women affairs Majia Aisha Ismail, to keep away from the event. The governor's threat to prohibit all Zamfara residents from watching the pageant was criticised by a group of Christian southerners in the state, who expressed their resolve to frustrate the plan.

So, spreading the word about Daniel's ThisDay piece just lit the fuse. It didn't help one bit that the tabloid ran some seven apologies, twice over the paper's masthead and ranging from 70 words to 11 paragraphs in a week's time.Two editorial columns written by Bolaji Abdullahi and Waziri Adio, both Muslim staffers, cut no ice with the rampaging mobs. Abdullahi in his piece titled 'What is this Miss World Thing About Anyway?' slammed the concept behind the event. Adio in his piece 'No, ThisDay is not anti-Islam', wrote that the offending article was an inadvertent error. Then, in a last attempt to soothe inflamed passions, the paper ran a story indicating that the country's Islamic leadership, represented by Lateef Adegbite, secretary-general of the Nigerian Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs, had accepted its apologies. The Nigerian President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammadu Maccido, some governors, religious and political leaders also lent their voices to the appeals for restraint.

But the damage had already been done. Last Friday, panic-stricken organisers cancelled the pageant and shifted it to London (see box). Two days later, a chartered plane flew out the rattled contestants from Abuja to London. An official of the Miss World organising committee told Outlook that there was intense pressure from the parents and families of the participants to pull out from Nigeria. They were alarmed by reports that the prestigious five-star NiCON-Hilton hotel where the girls were holed up was close to a riot-hit neighbourhood in Abuja. There were reports that the rioters were even planning to invade the hotel and attack the contestants, so soldiers were swiftly deployed to provide security.

With the mayhem over, it's time to count the costs. Conservative estimates put the loss incurred from the event's cancellation and pulling out of Nigeria at millions of dollars. The Nigerian government had allocated a substantial amount on the contestants and their crew's accommodation, travelling and food for the 28 days of the contest in the country. One of Nigeria's 36 states and a sponsor, Cross River, spent $1 million to host the contestants while another, Rivers, doled out over $2 million for putting up an ethnic fashion parade. Some $10 million was paid by the sponsors to the Miss World organisation for hosting rights.

But the more serious impact will be on Nigeria's already bruised image. If Miss World was planned as the country's image makeover, it was a disaster.

The country has been battling an image crisis, no thanks to verdicts handed down by Sharia courts in the north—Sharia is enforced in Kaduna too—since the return of democratic rule in 1999. The stoning sentence on Amina was really the last straw: some of the contestants even said they would campaign against the Sharia system.

Sharia has been declared in only 12 of Nigeria's 31 states—since its introduction in Zamfara two years ago—in open violation of the country's secular constitution. And President Obasanjo has been unable to take them on as the 12 northern states constitute a solid votebank. (Without their help he can't hope to get re-elected next year.)

Sharia has become the cause of sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians because the laws are forcibly imposed on Christians and other indigenous religions in the northern states. So, if a Christian couple have to travel by bus in the north, they must do so separately, as Sharia forbids them from using the same transport.

Now, minister of information and national orientation Prof Jerry Gana is blaming the international media of running a sustained campaign of calumny against the nation in the run-up to the event. But the fact is that ethnic and religious fighting has become common in Africa's most populous nation. More than 10,000 people have been killed in clashes since a civilian government replaced the junta in 1999 and since riots in Kaduna two years ago that killed up to 2,000 people.

President Obasanjo has travelled around the world a number of times, striving hard to bolster the nation's image and attract foreign investment. The Miss World disaster has now put paid to all his efforts and vindicated the international community's fears that the country is not a safe investment destination. Obasanjo has also lost support of a lot of his countrymen: rioters were given free rein in Abuja as the police remained idle bystanders and the president refused to cut short a trip to Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, to return to Abuja and personally supervise the situation. This, after security concerns have been consistently cited by foreign investors as a deterrent to come to Nigeria.

After all, the country is badly in need of foreign investments to revive its ailing industries and crumbling infrastructure, and to reduce unemployment.

The government has been helpless in reducing unemployment, making the legions of unemployed young men in the northern cities vulnerable to manipulation by venal politicians and religious leaders. The country is bidding to host the 2010 World Cup finals against South Africa, but after the Miss World debacle that is beginning to look like an impossibility. For beleaguered Nigeria, it's back to square one.

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(The author is a journalist with The Punch, Nigeria's largest selling daily.)