I landed in Abidjan and was met by a terrific rain storm that went on all night and flooded the roads to knee-height. It's good to be back though, in a city where the Ivorian French accent is rounded and singing, and people seem more reserved, or perhaps more wary of white foreigners, and I can pretty much go about my business without being noticed all the time.

Last night's rain brought with it another colossal mess, the traffic, which did not move for more than two hours along the city's main artery. I was lucky enough to have the kind of taxi driver one doesn't find much in Dakar anymore, the kind who will do everything possible to get to the destination more quickly than if we sat it out. Careering off the highway and onto blocked smaller roads, mine smiled and waved and cajoled his way through the traffic and into a car-wreck yard, whose muddy thoroughfare had been blocked by young mechanics with a tyre.

"Give us 100 francs," shouted the boys, which we did, and they lifted up the tyre barrier to let us pass. This is what my friend and fellow Africa blogger Pauline calls, West Africa Wins Always. As we churned up the mud to pass out the other side, the tyre was slammed back down and the car behind us forced to stop, and hand over money.

I have been trying to get into Nigeria. At the embassy I realised I didn't have the right papers, and was about to despair when a large, fleshy black woman with an incredibly deep southern American accent, waddled up to the application window and forced her way into the face of the bony, acid-faced secretary on the other side. She declared that she was an American citizen, although was most likely of Liberian origin.

"I am the minister of my church and I don't need no letter from nobody," she said, her voice unavoidably loud, the whole bedraggled room of Nigerians turning to stare at this fascinating creature.

"She don't know what the hell she talking about," the lady, dressed entirely in pink, bellowed as she walked away from the window and went to sit down on one of the plastic chairs. "I don't need no invitation letter to go nowhere."

"No! She is sitting there," she barked, almost screamed at a young Nigerian who came in and wanted to take the empty chair next to her. Her mignon, an embarrassed-looking Ivorian girl, smiled apologetically at the man, and did not take the seat allocated to her. Instead she started making frantic calls to the ambassador, who did not answer his phone, at the request of the minister who sat, false pink and gold nails fanned elegantly across her lap, calling out orders.

"You get the ambassador on the phone and you tell him what I be going through down here. I shouldn't have to put up with this. They ask me to come and preach in Lagos and that what I'm trying to do."

As the furor died down, and the invitation was sent for by two further mignons, I leaned in to hear a conversation between a Nigerian woman who had come in, and the minister. The Nigerian was telling the minister, who was not listening but instead umming whilst looking at her telephone, how she was out in the villages feeding children and giving them clothes and everything, but needed more money to keep her operations going.

"There's a lot of money out there," the pink lady said conspiratorially, leaning in towards the Nigerian. "The Chinese, the Lebanese, the EU," at which point she swept her podgy hand towards me, "they give billions of dollars. But they gonna take it for you cause they think you're stupid. By the time it gets to you, it's just a cup of soup. None of the food gets to the villages, none of the trucks get to the villages," the lady had become breathless, "it's just for these people"- once more sweeping her hand towards me- "to ride around Africa saying what good things they're doing. So until you get accurate records, that's going to keep on happening. Accurate records."

"Accurate...records," the listener repeated slowly, savouring these words of advice as if they were the answer to so many of life's difficult questions. "Accurate records."

The minister, whose briefcase flipped open spilling hundreds of pink church leaflets proclaiming her ministry was the way to finding everlasting joy in the lord, was talking about her trip to preach at a church in Lagos.

"That's why they got security and everything. Cause Lagos is a crazy place. But I trust the Lord is with me, I trust he is there."