For a few days now, the media in Nigeria has been caught up in a controversy about the $150 Billion Samoa Deal allegedly signed by the Nigerian government led by Dictator Tinubu. While it is important to condemn this government’s policy of loaning money to squander and keeping us under neocolonialism through debt traps, we must also not be silent because we want to appease a deeply religious and conservative section of the population who are very loud, despite the fact that they are probably a minority. Truly, any deeply thinking Nigerian should be angry at the loan deal, not because of the LGBT rights clause and not just because of the fact that if further puts Nigeria in a debt trap. We should be angry that we have created a country where human rights like LGBT rights have to be used as bargaining chips before we can respect such rights. We should bury our heads deep in shame!
We have created a country where LGBTQ rights have to be used as a condition for financial support before we can stop our cultures and laws that undermine such rights. LGBTQ right is actually the universal and indivisible human right to privacy and consensual pleasure. It’s nothing more. Human rights are not divisible. You can’t divide human rights by continent or culture. As long as your culture and continent are not occupied by animals, basic human rights apply to you. No border can divide human rights, and long as there are humans within those borders. We should be wailing in the pain of shame that such human rights as LGBTQ rights have to be negotiated with us and a condition for loans before our country’s representatives even consider it. I cannot stop saying it’s a shame!
This rage is perfectly compatible with my rage at the economic transactions of imperialism that seek to trap developing nations with loans and debts under the control of the developed nations who want to extract our resources so that their ruling class can accumulate wealth. These economic transactions perpetuate poverty and inequality in our nations by exploiting our national vulnerabilities in all sectors and that’s why they have to leverage our leaders into accepting them sometimes. But in the event that this is our sad reality, I am more proud that they have to leverage our leaders for such loans for fuel subsidies (a welfare package to make life easier for the people) to be removed. The fact that they needed that leverage showed that as a country we understood that the welfare of the people was important and some foreign forces had to leverage it out of our country with predatory IMF loans. I am more proud of that, despite my consistent resistance to such fuel subsidy removal because of the impoverishment and anguish it has created for the people of Nigeria. I am more proud of that because they have to force us before we drop good things like subsidy policies that favor the welfare of our people. I am very sad that we are being forced to accept basic human rights like LGBTQ rights. Are we that bad as a people?
How is LGBTQ rights a threat to Nigeria’s sovereignty or culture? How is any human rights a threat to African culture? This is a question I have asked so many times. It only shows that we have misunderstood what sovereignty means. Sovereignty is the ability of a nation to protect and promote the rights of all its citizens. Is Nigeria a sovereign state when our successive governments have been incapable of protecting us from banditry, kidnappings, and terrorism that has become rampant for up to 15 years now? The death toll from the Borno wedding terrorist bombing last week is now 32 souls. Is Nigeria a sovereign state when the right to self-determination, right to food, right to belief, right to sexuality, and most importantly right to protest and dissent is not being promoted for all citizens? Hundreds were killed for the #EndSARS protests. Omoyele Sowore was kept in Nigeria for five years because he exercised his right to protest. Nnamdi Kanu is still in jail for trying to exercise his right to self-determination. I thought defending sovereignty was a thing for people who are actually sovereign. Was Nigeria ever a sovereign state?
But let’s assume without conceding that Nigeria is a sovereign state like they want us to believe, or let’s assume this controversy is about bringing sovereignty to a country that we all agree was never sovereign. How do LGBTQ rights threaten the ability of the Nigerian state to protect its citizens? How does it threaten our sovereignty? How do LGBTQ rights threaten the rights of all citizens? In fact, it is part of the rights of all citizens to choose how they wish to use their genitals consensually. I thought Nigeria and the rest of Africa have diverse cultures that are constantly evolving, so why does it become just one culture that does not tolerate dissent when LGBTQ rights is the topic? Are we proud that our prestigious culture across Africa is being used to justify the maiming, burning, torturing, killing, and jailing of LGBTQ people across our continent? Is that how we want our culture to be? A culture where Bobrisky is currently being persecuted for dressing like a woman? Or do we want our culture in Africa to be attached to the prestigious fact that King Mwanga II who ruled Buganda (now Uganda) till 1903 was an openly gay/bisexual African king? How did respecting the lived realities and rights of LGBTQ Nigerians become a foreign issue? Are LGBTQ Nigerians no longer Nigerians or humans by virtue of sexuality? Are we going to be brutal people who are insensitive to other people like us, because we are being sensitive to some vague conception of culture?
How does LGBTQ rights debase our democracy in Nigeria? Was the SSMPA law passed to criminalize LGBTQ rights in Nigeria a democratic decision? Are we saying the National Assembly is undemocratic when they pass laws to give themselves billions in allowance and SUVs while taxing us, but democratic when they pass homophobic laws that disrespect universal human rights? What manner of double standard is this?! Are we saying we have respected the democratic rights of Nigerians who disagree with that homophobic law, and we are just angry at the undemocratic imposition by imperialist powers and their agreements? Are we saying that Nigeria is democratic in a country where one of the organizers of the June 12 Democracy Day protests, Juwon Sanyaolu, was kidnapped by the DSS and the Police a day before the protests, and tortured? Are we suddenly saying that the results of the 2023 elections represent the true wishes of the Nigerian electorate? Are we saying that challenging laws that already exist (if we find them oppressive) is no longer a part of democracy?
Are we only interested in fighting oppression only when it directly concerns us personally? The problem I have found in my years of activism in Nigeria is not even this selfishness. It is the lack of awareness of what our selfish interests are, as Nigerians. It’s as if we are unaware that it is our selfish interests for LGBTQ rights to exist. It’s as if we don’t understand that human rights is a spectrum and taking away LGBTQ rights is already a basis for taking away the right to dress how we want as Nigerians. In fact, that law was proposed in the form of an anti-crossdressing bill after we allowed SSMPA to stand. No matter how traditional you are as a Nigerian, I’m sure you don’t want this government to decide how you dress. I’m sure you dont want to offend any do-you-knwo-who-I-am Nigerian that will use your dressing as an excuse to throw you in jail because you offended them over somethng else and they are too proud to talk it out with you. The basis of that proposed dressing law was the same basis for the anti-LGBTQ law. The basis for both laws was a clear separation of two genders. Are we not feeding the monster that will later eat us for breakfast and move on to eat the next person to us for lunch? Do we not know that all human rights are connected and that’s why they are universal and indivisible?
Are we only outraged and alarmed when Nigerian politicians accept loan conditions like LGBTQ rights that do not harm us, yet very silent and unalarmed when they accept subsidy removal and increased taxation as loan conditions that throw all of us into poverty? If we are outraged by those economic transactions, will we not be on the streets like the youths of Kenya? Do we even know what we’re doing? Are we actually the nauseating ‘perverts’ who care and are more concerned with what other people do consensually with their genitals than about what our government does with the economy? I don’t know how else to write this than to ask all of these questions.
Omole Ibukun is a socialist activist who writes from Abuja, Nigeria
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