When The Law Leverages Killers, by Kene Obiezu

The tragic murder of an Abuja-based crossdresser popularly known as ‘Area mama’ in August bares the ferocious fangs of a country hell-bent on preserving its heritage of heinous hypocrisy.
The crossdresser was murdered and left by the roadside in Abuja the country’s supposedly safe and serene capital in a manner that would have generated more furore were the late crossdresser not one of the more daring members of Nigeria’s repressed LGBTI community. The discrimination is decades old, even if its chief instrument is only a decade old.

In 2014,Nigeria’s National Assembly uncharacteristically hastened the passage of the Same Sex (Prohibition) Act. The law was to serve as a lance with which a country united in revulsion and righteous indignation against same-sex relationships would pierce the to pierce the perversion of same-sex couples and the illusions of the West in backing more freedoms for the community. For Goodluck Jonathan, president at the time, and the National Assembly, it was simply unthinkable that such an alien lifestyle would be allowed to infiltrate Nigeria and corrupt its young.

Since the law passed, the LGBTI community in Nigeria, hidden in any case, has slunk deeper into the shadows, with the law casting long shadows over their rights in a country that prefers to pilfer Peter to pay Paul.

The law which barely conceals the spectrum and savagery of its sanctions has literally translated into latent and patent discrimination since its passage and is unique for the fact that it was the first time a law in Nigeria justified discrimination.

Simply put, the law has emboldened killers in a country of killers. Since the passage of the law, members of the LGBTI community have suffered different forms of attacks including death.

In discriminating against the LGBTI community, Nigeria and a handful of other African countries who ignore more pressing problems, presume that the community is a product of western perversion, and more that it can legislate what people choose to do with their bodies and lives.

What diagnosis is to be done for a country whose legislators leave the burning house of legality to chase the mice of morality?

What divination is to be made for a country whose legislators presume to legislate matters of the heart and body? What drugs can possibly cure the legislative psychosis that forcefully fuels such a national delusion?

An alarming number of African countries continue to criminalize the LGBTI community. In what is often intended as a direct sucker punch to the west where those who do not conform to sexual stereotypes find more space, African countries are desperate to harry and hound, ignoring in the process a minority that mirrors the fathomless contradictions of the human experience.

As with other minorities in Nigeria and elsewhere, the treatment of the LGBTI community forced to retreat into oppressive shadows by a repressive law has become a question of justice and must be treated as such. Because it is a question of justice, their rights can no longer be subject to the riotously selective repulsion or revulsion of anyone. In this wise, law which stands to defend those who would otherwise be trampled by others cannot be seen to tolerate such oppression. Any law that criminalises people due to their sexuality is in itself reprehensible, an outrage that should be repudiated. The lines between justice and the law should not be blurred by some warped and extremely suspect interpretation of morality. The law has served no useful purpose and ought to be struck down.

For an administration that informally elevated corruption to a state policy by its complicity and complacency, the legislation was a signature achievement meant to launder its reputation according to locals. In ignominiously ignoring reality and dubiously legislating morality the National Assembly under the Jonathan presidency danced to the drumbeats of distraction while Nigerians groaned under government dereliction.
It Is a fool’s errand for Nigeria or any other African country to preoccupy itself with legislating morality. In the face of modernity, morality must be left to the subjective decisions of individuals. That is what true freedom means in the context of statehood, which should preclude unnecessary and inconsistent resort to subjective whims and caprices of a few inconsistent individuals.

It is especially futile for Nigeria’s National Assembly—that cesspool of corruption and complacency—to presume to make morsels of morality for Nigerians to munch. If successive sessions of the National Assembly had any morality beyond the perfunctory and performative, Nigeria would not be stuck in this current rut where famished citizens distract themselves with murderous orgies of discrimination while conveniently ignoring the rot which holds the roots of their common misery.

Nigeria is like a dying, misdiagnosed patient who continues to take impotent pills for an ailment that requires immediate open-heart surgery. It is only a matter of time before the death rattle precedes the death knell.

Kene Obiezu,
keneobiezu@gmail.com