Moreni ke Taire
9 February 2006
column
On June 19 of last year, 18 year old teenager, Usman Sani and Kabir Yusuf, a 40 year old of the same sex were arrested in a public toilet near the Sharia court of the Nigerian city of Katsina. Police claimed that they confessed to having sex together, an offence punishable by death.
It made a big story in the parts of the world where people made much noise about freedom. In Nigeria, it was hardly newsworthy.
What had been newsworthy, thanks to female activists who brought it to the attention of the media, both local and international because of the gender discriminations inherent in it, was the Amina Lawal case earlier this millennium.
In one of the most unforgettable criminal affairs in the history of the Nigerian justice system in modern times, a 30 year old woman called Amina Lawal was sentenced to death in Katsina State for having a child out of wedlock thereby proving that she had committed adultery.
One of the strongest points her defense lawyers tried to make was that the man with whom she had committed adultery had gone scot-free because no one could prove it.
Though there had been the Sefiya's case before the Amina Lawal own, it was the latter that caught the most Nigerians' attention to the attempt of some state governments at digging up their religious laws and applying them across board to all Moslem residents of their states.
It was not to say that a stir was not caused earlier on when the Zamfara State government had blazed the trail in the conversion of Sharia to a state code.
Nigerians, particularly of the South of the country could have been heard crying out from the middle of the desert. And it has remained so.
The problem is this: if the death sentences by stoning that Sefiya Ahmodu, Amina Lawal, Usman Sani and Kabir Yusuf faced had captured the Nigerian indignation, it was not so much for the infringement of the respective laws on the natural right to sexual orientations of the victims as for the Moslem-ness of it. It had been, in the main, a "my-religion-is-better-than-yours" expression of their longsuffering Southhood.
It might not be considered very bewildering therefore if the same voices that cried out in protest of the Sharia issue are now silent as a grave over the new proposed bill banning same sex marriage and five years in one of our particularly disgusting Nigerian jails for flouting the ban.
No one seems to be complaining any violently that whether the punishment is stoning by death or five years behind bars (if you can not buy your way out, given the Nigerian situation), the point is it is nobody's business what anybody does with their bodies.
If anything, the proposed bill is the greatest insult the Federal Government has ever thrown in the face of the National Assembly, in spite of the fact that it has thrown out far more important bills, such as the one which proposed the elimination of all forms of violence against women.
Clearly, the question of whether homosexuals are allowed to marry or not are not the most important issue we are faced with right now in our national life, even on the social scene. We have never, in the first instance, had any solid laws regarding marriage, even in the secular situation.
In the churches and mosques the laws guiding marriage and cohabitation are no less lax, with many highly placed Christians being husbands of more than one wife and/or having children by more than one wife, and with highly placed Moslems with more than one wife showing open favouritism . We have no laws that take care of women in marriages and, in the face of polygamy (which the information minister might argue is African), the very idea of bigamy is all but ridiculous.
One wonders then why our government is in such a hurry to make this an issue. To be fair the Nigerian chief Anglican cleric has repeatedly made his stance known about homosexuality and same sex marriage, though his declarations to that effect are of about much magnitude as German Chancellor Schroeder, declaring his stance against the war in Iraq to a dinner party in Lagos last weekend.
When government begins to preempt a matter like this in a country where homosexualism has not only been a reality for so long but has been associated with some of the wealthiest and most highly placed Nigerian men, what may have been perceived as "holier than thou" might now be perceived rather as more "conservative than thou".
Those who say that the Nigerian government has carried homophobia to ridiculous levels are not wrong, but are not as right as those who argue that the anti same sex marriage law is a political trap that is being set now to be used later. Possibly for 2007?
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