Abuja, the nation's sterile capital, was abuzz this week. Under different circumstances, the presence of African leaders would just have been the kind of distraction that President Goodluck Jonathan needed to get some respite from his domestic woes. Leaders from 12 African countries met in Abuja to review progress in tackling some of the continent's most deadly pestilences - malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. These diseases claim millions of lives on the continent yearly.

With sub-Saharan Africa falling behind in meeting the MDGs, the Abuja meeting, if nothing else, was another chance to talk the talk. But the meeting failed to deliver even this minimum benefit.

That's putting it nicely. Out of the 12 countries present, only three - Benin, Ethiopia and Uganda - have made absolute progress in reducing extreme poverty in the last decade. In a sense, therefore, it was not just a gathering of leaders a number of whom have failed to tackle their country's most urgent problems. It was, in fact, a gathering of leaders who are, themselves, mainly the problem with their own countries. Jonathan was in bad company.

To start with, Kenya's president Uhuru Kenyatta is a wanted man. From the charges against him at the International Criminal Court, he was indirectly responsible for the deaths of 1,300 Kenyans, including women and children, during the post-election violence in 2007/8, which also left over 600,000 displaced. He has denied any wrongdoing, but we'll have to wait and see what happens when his trial starts in about four months' time.

In comparison with Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir, another Jonathan guest, however, Kenyatta looks like a rookie. How could Al Bashir have come to Abuja to share any inspiring stories about saving the continent from anything at all, when the blood of over 300,000 people, including women and children, murdered in Sudan by his Janjaweed militias is crying for justice? On the watch of this man whom Jonathan had invited to come and talk about HIV/AIDS, militias gang-raped women, 15 to one. Girls were raped in front of their fathers and mothers and children hacked to death while their parents' hands were tied to their backs with their faces to the sun. Villages were burned and over two million people displaced. And this man came here to talk to us about malaria and TB and HIV/AIDS? He was lucky to have fled like the rogue leader that he is and for long may his shadows chase him. Why Nigeria's foreign minister, Olugbenga Ashiru, is defending Al Bashir, I don't know. Surely, he must have thought that we're yam heads when he said Al Bashir was here on the invitation of the AU. Was he also smuggled out with the approval of the AU? At least four other African countries - South Africa, Malawi, Zambia and Uganda - all members of the AU, had, in the past, refused to receive him on the same grounds on which Jonathan rolled out the red carpet for him.

A third Jonathan guest not wanted by the ICC like the other two, but no less possessed of demons, is Swaziland's King Mswati III. In 2000, this king said during a parliamentary debate that all men living with HIV/AIDS should be "sterilized and branded". So, what did he come here to say? If there's any man who really needs to be sterilized, it's Mswati who has 14 wives and still picks a maiden every year at the annual reed dance in Lobamba.

Sometime ago, Amnesty International intervened in a scandal in which foot soldiers from the king's palace abducted a high school student from the classroom. When her mother reported to a nearby police station, she was told that the girl, Zena Mahlangu, was being groomed as wife for King Mswati. The family's anguished cry for help was drowned in a flood of the king's testosterone. That poor girl became the king's wife three years ago and now has two children for Jonathan's guest. And Mswati was here to inspire us to fight malaria and TB and HIV/AIDS, even posing for a photo-op with our president?

If he was Citizen Jonathan, the president could chose his friends and we won't give a damn even if he treated them to the moon on a stick. But as long as he is Nigeria's president, he cannot be in the company of the Al Bashirs and King Mswatis of this world and not leave us with the impression that he's taking us for a shaming ride.

Thanks to the president, his unwanted guests have stolen the headlines, leaving the continent's most telling problems stranded for answers.

Still On Dame Jonathan's Son, Amaechi

One week after Wole Soyinka reminded Dame Patience Jonathan that she must be a lady first, and then earn her place as first lady, Madam appears to have launched a charm offensive.

In the last few days, we have been told of how earnestly she prays for peace in Rivers State. On Wednesday, in fact, she went spiritual, invoking scripture after scripture as she preached to a group of bishops who visited her in Aso Rock, on the virtues of truth and respect. She traced the root of her problem with Governor Rotimi Amaechi to the absence of these virtues and in a voice that almost brought crocodile tears to my eyes, Madam remarked that Amaechi was her son, her beloved son.

True, Ma'am, very true. As I reflected on her words, I pinched myself. What would have happened if, during the free for all at the state House of Assembly in Port Harcourt a few days ago, a stray bullet had caught Amaechi, Madam's beloved son? Does Madam love this son so much that she relocated to Port Harcourt and spent 11 days working out the most traumatic ways to get rid of him?