Nigeria's Heinous Anti-Gay Bill

Back in the days when I was in-house counsel for an oil company, Nigeria was often referred to as "the armpit of the world" at best and other parts of the anatomy below the waist at many other times. Corruption, strife and abysmal conditions were the norm and visiting oil personnel had to take great care not to become ill (those of us who traveled to Africa actually had personal medical kits that had medications for anything and everything, including malaria). Not much has changed and the country has remained a basket case. So what do the Nigerian politicians do? Go on an anti-gay jihad, of course. Sadly, it seems to be the norm in much of Africa - do anything to distract the generally ignorant populace from the corruption and incompetence of the politicians. CNN has a piece that looks at the heinous anti-gay bill that has cleared the nation's Senate. Here are highlights:

It is important to first understand that no gay Nigerian, as far as anyone knows, is seeking marriage -- in Nigeria. You can comb the breadth of our decidedly homophobic media ("Homosexuals are in trouble!" crowed The Sun Newspapers, no doubt mirroring the excitement of its upright editorial board), and there is neither anecdotal nor empirical evidence of a clamor, even a quiet one, for gays to be married in churches, mosques or courts.

Still, our legislators were hard at work over a considerable number of weeks while the rest of sane Nigeria, in a state of suspended disbelief, ignored them; convinced that, in a country with pressing issues such as fuel subsidy removal and debilitating insecurity, this frivolous legislation would not see light of day. Until yesterday when, of course, it did.

Our elected representatives in the Senate, armed with their version of our National Moral Code, took time off urgent national issues to tackle the even more urgent evil of gay marriages. Before we could catch our breaths, our over-paid and under-worked Senators had legalized homophobia.

According to the law, not only is gay marriage a crime punishable by a 14-year jail term, but "any person who registers operates or participates in gay... organizations" faces a decade in jail -- a clause that specifically targets the many active sexuality rights advocacy groups in the country.

By the time the House of Representatives adds its predictable voice to this and the President signs it into law, writing this kind of piece might even risk jail time.

Many Nigerians are convinced that homosexuality is "of the devil", against our "culture" and an encroachment of "sad Western values." . . . . That's forgetting that the real giant of Africa, South Africa, is the continent's bastion of sexuality rights.

"Our values are our values," the pompous senate president David Mark replies to critics of the bill. Nonsense he can get away with, only because a large segment of our educated population is unaware that animals have been found to be gay.

Dead cliches like "God did not make Adam and Steve" continue to get excited choruses from sedated congregations and people still declare with ignorance that "homosexuality is not a part of our culture", conveniently skimming over historical evidence of the practice in the East and North of the country; and blissfully unaware that the origins of homophobia in our societies can only be traced to the influx of foreign religions.

Indeed, you have to weep for a people that decry "foreign imperialism" on one hand, and then ignorantly hide under the cover of colonial influences to perpetuate intolerance.

It's the same country whose ex-president recently paid a 'courtesy visit' to appease confessed terrorists; the same country where four men who savagely raped a girl and recorded it on video were defended by a police chief as "dealing with snobbish girls." Indeed, what else can one expect from a Senate that houses a member who defiled and took for a wife, a girl barely in her teens only last year?

But gays -- who only pray for the right to be left alone since they do the rest of us no harm - are the mortal threat to our "moral fabric". They severely threaten the moral fabric of a nation which finds its place in the bottom of corruption rankings years in a row thanks to politicians like Mark who have sodomized the populace for decades now.

The pattern is all too familiar and the hate and bigotry is largely driven by imported homophobia - one of the hallmark export items of American Christianists.