Security cramps royal style
2003-12-03 07:48
Abuja - Queen Elizabeth II is set to arrive in West Africa on Wednesday in the former British colony Nigeria for the first time since it won its independence, as Abuja gears up to host the Commonwealth summit.
Forty-seven years have passed since the Queen last came to Nigeria, during which time it has suffered through civil war, military dictatorship and corrupt rule, still to emerge in the 21st century as Africa's most populous nation.
On Friday, Her Majesty will declare open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, and there will be plenty of pomp and ceremony as the guest of Nigeria's elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo.
"The Queen is delighted to be returning to a democratic Nigeria, and she's going to have particular pleasure to come out as head of the Commonwealth," her spokesperson Penny Russell-Smith said on Tuesday.
The Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, will only be in Nigeria for a little over three days however, arriving late on Wednesday and leaving on Saturday, and will divide their time between CHOGM and the state visit.
There will no opportunity to revisit the three-week odyssey the pair made as a young couple in 1956.
Then, they visited the southern port cities of Calabar, Lagos and Port Harcourt on the steamy, forested shores of the Gulf of Guinea, explored the Benue river valley and trekked to the great Islamic centres of the arid north.
Now the Queen will be limited to Nigeria's new model capital Abuja, and her husband will make a solo day trip to Lagos, to see old friends at a conservation centre and inspect a British funded project for HIV and Aids victims.
Fake village market
In fact, many eyebrows have been raised in Nigeria by the fact that the Queen's only real contact with apparently "real Nigerians" - as opposed to the Abuja political elite - will be in a fake village market populated by actors.
On Thursday she will take a short, half-hour drive to the village of New Karu just outside Abuja, where BBC television producers have built a film-set reconstruction of a street market, 500m from the real village.
There, followed by five cameras, she will circulate "reality TV" style among a coached crowd of tame locals and BBC actors playing their roles from a new educational radio soap opera, Voices, which will be recorded there.
New Karu's true denizens will be held back half-a-kilometre away by a security cordon, and only be allowed to watch their honoured guest by way of a live broadcast onto a specially erected cinema screen.
Many in Nigeria have expressed disappointment that the Queen will not see the daily reality of real village life.
But security concerns are paramount and there was no question of a royal walkabout in Nigeria's teeming slums.
The CHOGM summit will open on Friday and continue until Monday.