For a couple of years now the mainstream media and international institutions have been off and on highlighting the plight of white farmers and the 700,000 suburban Harrare citizens evicted from their homes by the nasty dictator Robert Mugabe. Amnesty International even penned a polite letter to President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria as chair of the African Union asking the Union to speak out against these gross breaches of human and civil rights in Zimbabwe. Prince Charles caused an outrage at Pope John Paul's funeral last year when he shook hands, inadvertently it was reported, with this man who has become a pariah in Europe over the past few years (poor Charles - his mind was probably on other looming events where he would be shut out of a church as well).

Last month Gordon Brown and Bill Gates made merry with Obasanjo over the announcement that Gates was giving $600m from his foundation to help fight Tuberculosis in Africa. Nigeria has become Africa's policeman. We have been supporting their efforts in helping to restore order in Liberia, Senegal, Chad and the Darfur area of Sudan most recently.

But in Nigeria, this "friend" of the west has been quietly getting on with evictions on a scale not even imagined by puny Zimbabwe. In the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, one of those vanity projects like Brasilia more motivated by racial and ethnic power play in the eighties, late last year the capital's authorities began the eviction and demolition of the homes of some 4,000,000 inhabitants. Yes, that's FOUR MILLION, out of a territory population of 7,000,000!

All this ostensibly on the basis that the equivalent of the "Unitary Development Plan" for the Federal Capital Territory when plans were originally laid, envisaged a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants only. Yup, this was merely a planning enforcement issue. And so, it seems, the west and the mainstream media, accept it as a bit of administravia along the lines of your local council ordering next door's too large conservatory to be removed.

FOUR MILLION people, forcibly removed from their homes and communities. And that's only the latest in a long history in Nigeria of heavy handed "enforcement" action against all sorts of rule breakers.

I remember when my father lived there when i was in my teens, in the eighties, we lived a couple of hundred yards down the creek from the "Thousand and four" (I think that was the number anyway) a block of government employees' flats on Victoria Island. In an era of coups and counter-coups, when corrupt ministers like Umaru Dikko were hosting parties in New York to celebrate their first billion dollars, these flats were regularly flushed clean of civil servants who had stopped paying rent, because government had stopped paying them.

And when our housekeeper didn't turn up for work one morning we dicovered that he, along with around a hundred thousand other "illegal" Ghanaian immigrants who did the sorts of jobs that Nigerians didn't want to do (like working for nasty white expatriate households clearly!) were rounded up and marched to the Benin border and deported.

And we continue to fete Obasanjo as some kind of west African hero, a one man UN peace-keeping force, the first remotely democratic leader of Africa's most populous nation for as long as anyone can remember really. With friends like these, who needs enemies like Mugabe? I suppose perhaps it could be said that wealth distribution (and there is HUGE natural wealth in Nigeria) is better in Nigeria - far more ministers and presidents and officials have become millionaires, even billionnaires in Nigeria than in quasi-Marxist Zimbabwe.

If Africa really is to be the focus for the next decades of international development, we've got to get our actions and their countries into some sort of perspective. Four million Nigerians are homeless and landless and we have said nothing.