Stepping off the ferry in Liverpool, Muhammadu Buhari was struck by the city’s orderliness. People obeyed the rules, observed the 18-year-old, who had won a competition to spend the summer in Britain. The rules didn’t even have to be written; society just worked. Order was also paramount at military college in Nigeria and the English town of Aldershot. The austerity of officer training, the career of choice for bright young men from the newly independent country’s north, suited the former head boy. He thrived in the repetitive drills, the hikes across unknown terrain in the dead of night.