SECTION 39: Home thoughts from abroad (2)

It is quite salutary to travel overseas and discover how irrelevant your country - which you like to think of as a significant member of the international community - is becoming.

The Nigerian media (Section 39 included) have been agonising about President Umaru Yar'Adua's decision to travel to Saudi Arabia last week instead of coming to New York.

It would have been one thing to not go to New York and stay home in Nigeria - that could at least have been explained away as a decision to forgo international joy-riding and face the country's problems. But to go to Jeddah instead of going to the United Nations?! One would like to say that Yar'Adua's non-appearance at the Climate Change summit and the United Nations General Assembly, or even the other events associated with this week's international activities in New York caused a great deal of international concern and comment, but the truth is that his non-appearance in New York was largely reflected in his non-appearance in the non-Nigerian media. It simply didn't matter. Out of sight was out of mind. Instead, as to African heads of state, it was Colonel Muammar Ghadaffi, with his 100 minute harangue to the General Assembly, who made all the headlines.

Well, our President has hardly been able to hold his own against the self-proclaimed saviour of the continent within Africa itself, so it would perhaps be expecting too much to imagine that if he had indeed ‘turned up' in New York, he would have said or done anything to dislodge the Libyan head of state who provided such good copy for the world's media. Nor would the behind-the-scenes lobbying for Nigeria's international ambitions that Yar'Adua didn't do in the United States have made much of a story either.

Our country did make some headlines though. The attempt by the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation to secure one sixth of Nigeria's oil output produced a Financial Times lead story headlined: "China Seeks Big Stake In Nigerian Oil". But that is because the East-West contest in Africa continues to agitate Western policy-makers, particularly since their dire warnings about the dangers of getting into bed with the Chinese don't appear to have yielded the desired horrified recoil by African countries. That may be because in comparison with the effects of a century of colonisation and preceding centuries of exploitation by Western powers, the trumpeted depredations of the Chinese don't seem particularly heinous.

But making headlines because of oil is hardly a new story about Nigeria (even if for once, the focus is not on the effect of attacks by militants on production levels). With the oil riches of Ghana about to come on stream and the discovery of huge oil deposits in Sierra Leone, Nigeria's oil is hardly going to remain a particularly unique story even in the West African sub-region.

Our sporting obsessions hardly cause a ripple elsewhere either. We in Nigeria may be tearing our hair out about the (non) performance of our team in age-graded football competitions, but anybody who wants to find out what is happening at the FIFA Under-20 World Cup competition currently taking place in Egypt where Nigeria's ambitions consist of progressing to the next round as the ‘best loser', you have to search the Internet.

News consumers in serious sporting countries are concerned about the competitions for the big boys.

So Nigeria, a would-be leading nation in Africa, is hardly a story either for good, or for bad.

Even the advertisements for chocolate on the London Underground trumpet the delights of Ghanaian cocoa. It is cocoa farms in Ghana that have won the coveted ‘Fair Trade' award which certifies that no exploitation of workers or children, or other human rights abuses accompanied the production of the cocoa that went into the preparation of Cadbury's Dairy Milk Chocolate. Of course, the infamous ‘District 9' (which is said to portray Nigerians as exploitative gangsters) is playing at multiplex cinemas all over London, but as regards that film, I defer to the belated indignation of our Minister for Information and others by boycotting the film.

Rather than demanding that it should be banned, that is.

And yet, and yet ... a visitor to London cannot escape signs of the quiet positive penetration by Nigerian people into the fabric of life in England. The young woman opposite me on the train is reading Chimamanda Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. A list of 28 black playwrights who have had plays produced in Britain in the last two years yields four or five recognisably Nigerian names. The patrons of the growing number of Nigerian eateries in London are not only nostalgic exiles and unadventurous visiting Nigerians, but natives and other members of multi-cultural Britain.

These little green shoots will not yield a lot of news headlines. But maybe sometimes, no news is good news.