The downside of cricket, a Pakistani High Commissioner once told me, is that to have cricket one had to have the British.
Last week President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe was saying pretty much the same thing about the Commonwealth. To the non-members and non-players both are, frankly, rather mysterious and trivial.
As bitter as the fighting in the old empire club got in Nigeria, it was — to stretch the English analogy — a storm in a teacup for the rest of the world.
Even as the Anglophiles battled it out in Abuja, North Africans and their European neighbours across the Mediterranean were having a summit of their own.
The practically named Five-plus-Five summit in Tunis brought the presidents of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya (the Maghreb grouping) together with their counterparts from Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Malta.
The major issue on the agenda was illegal immigration over the Western Mediterranean basin. More than half a million people a year attempt the short crossing from Morocco to Spain, many of them losing their lives in the straits of Gibraltar.
The Southern Europeans take a more pragmatic view of this than their cooler northern neighbours.
Immigrants, legal or otherwise, are an important part of their economies, doing jobs that their own nationals do not want to do.
There is, however, a growing concern about the criminality associated with this migration. Morocco’s major cash crop is dagga. This is also its chief export into Europe, where it is marketed mainly by illegal immigrants.
Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, put the best diplomatic gloss on it, saying Europe welcomed immigrants but did not want the newcomers ‘living under conditions of anarchy and indignityâ€.
Summit host Tunisian President Zine el Abidine ben Ali said if the European were serious about the Africans plugging their porous borders, they would have to supply financial assistance.
Moreover, a phenomenon as widespread as illegal immigration had to be tackled globally. The final declaration agrees on ‘the importance of consolidating further the integration of migrants legally residing in host countries and on endeavouring to protect their rights in conformity with national legislations in these countries, and declare their support for all efforts aiming at ensuring favourable conditions to facilitate the movement of persons and residence conditionsâ€.
Leaders expressed ‘their conviction that the regulation of migration towards Europe represents an important economic, social and human factor, both for the host countries and for the countries of originâ€.
The declaration underlined ‘that the fight against illegal immigration and trafficking in human beings requires a common action and a concerted cooperation, including on the operational level, and a better way to address the real causes of these plagues, while paying attention to respect of human dignityâ€.
Not surprisingly, terrorism also loomed large. The declaration recorded the participants’ ‘strongest condemnation of terrorism, in all its forms, and of organised transnational crime, namely drug trafficking, arms dealing and money launderingâ€.
Since the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, North Africa’s plague of Islamic fundamentalist terror has been treated far more sympathetically in the Western world.
Algeria once bore the brunt of the terrorism almost alone. Western governments provided shelter for Algerian terrorists and accepted them as fugitives from the human rights excesses of the military regime. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika told the summit it was important to understand properly the underlying causes of terrorism. Both Morocco and Tunisia have also recently been targeted by the fanatics.
French President Jacques Chirac spoke of the critical need to enliven the Maghreb economy. The economic grouping of the North African countries has been paralysed by Morocco’s continued illegal occupation of the Western Sahara and Algeria’s support for the Saharawi government-in-exile.
The Maghreb was further spotlighted last week with the visit to the region of United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Washington has announced that it has doubled its military assistance to Morocco and quadrupled economic aid to the kingdom because of its support for the US position on the Middle East.
Nevertheless, Washington is pressing Morocco to implement a settlement plan in Western Sahara that will eventually lead to a referendum of the Saharawi people on who they wish to rule them.
The plan, negotiated with Morocco by former US secretary of state James Baker in his capacity as special representative of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, is a watered-down version of the original UN settlement plan on which Morocco reneged.
The so-called Baker plan would give Morocco joint sovereignty over the Western Sahara until the referendum in four or five years’ time. France, however, believes that losing Western Sahara will bring down the wobbly throne of Mohammed VI.
Like the apartheid regime 20 years ago, Morocco continues to rely on the veto power of two permanent members of the UN Security Council to protect it from sanctions for its defiance of the world organisation.