High-profile British Labour MP Diane Abbott is facing an angry backlash over an article she wrote in a Jamaican newspaper condemning Nigeria

Ned Temko:

Abbott, whose constituency has a large Nigerian community, is being denounced as impolite, impolitic, ill-informed and hypocritical as copies of her article, 'Think Jamaica is bad? Try Nigeria', circulate on the internet. She is also accused of stoking tension between Britain's Jamaican and Nigerian communities.

Writing in Jamaica's Sunday Observer, Abbott said that oil-rich Nigeria had become an ecological disaster area. It was riven by religious conflict, with dozens killed in rioting over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which 'most Nigerians had not actually seen'. She called President Olusegun Obasanjo a 'recycled general' trying to hold office for life, and added: 'When it comes to corruption, Nigerians make Jamaicans, and every other nationality in the world, look like mere amateurs.'

Critics of the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington in London are particularly offended because she is such a significant politician. The daughter of Jamaican parents who settled in Britain, she became the first black woman elected to Parliament, and now stars in the BBC's Daily Politics programme.

While some criticism on the letters pages of the Jamaican paper is from official Nigerian representatives, two of the broadsides are from British Nigerians. A third is from the London-based head of a Nigerian human-rights group, Kayode Ogundamisi. He said yesterday that he had no quarrel with Abbott's criticism of the Nigerian regime, but shared other British-based Nigerians' anger over her use of a Jamaican paper to air her views. He accused her of remaining silent in the Commons on Nigerian human rights abuses, a point he said he had made to her in a letters and emails that 'she has not even acknowledged'. 'I see her on the Daily Politics talking about Iraq,' Ogundamisi said, 'but not a word about Nigeria - in fact, not a word about Africa.

'She has not made any effort to contact any Nigerian group, and we are very disappointed. She is right that there is no democracy in Nigeria, but she should do something about it, not write an article in a Jamaican newspaper.'

The article had caused a perception among Nigerians that she was biased towards Jamaican people.

A nationalist race to the bottom