nigerian government aims promoting homophobia

By Mongezi Mhlongo (BTM Reporter)

NIGERIA - November 20, 2008: With the media perplexing lives of gay people in Nigeria, the government there plans to clamp down on them.

This comes after Nigeria’s State and Federal governments announced to arrest all homosexuals and to ‘bring to book’ Rev Jide Macaulay of House of Rainbow Metropolitan Community. Macaulay’s church was closed two months ago after the media in that country claimed it was an exclusively homosexuals church.

“Government is stalking our congregation. They [the government] want to gang up against us as a group and make multiple arrests of members. The government is greatly sensitized and incited by the prejudicial media”, Stephanie Adaralegbe, a member of House of Rainbow who was earlier physically attacked on the basis of her sexual orientation, said.

She added that the Nigerian media is a repository of “stigmatic aspersions that inflame homophobia from all nooks and crannies.”

“They could be as crude as the anachronistic society itself”, she said.

Prior to the closure of the House of Rainbow, the media had continuously attacked the church claiming that it is an exclusively gay congregation promoting homosexuality.

Following its closure recently, the government was expected to intervene in combating such practice by chastising all those deemed accountable. 
 
Adding salt to injury, Nigeria’s Sunday Sun recently published a story with the headline “Homosexuals must die – Muslim cleric.”

The article contained shocking utterances by Muslim cleric Professor Is-haq Akintola who suggested that homosexuals should be assassinated.

“Homosexuality is a great sin in Islam. It is as grievous as adultery and punishment should be the same. Homosexuals are to be condemned to death”, he told the paper.

Ankintola indicated that homosexuality is stimulated by over crowding in prisons suggesting that homosexuality is a practice learned in prisons.

“Our prisons here in Nigeria are not corrective. Our prisons are torture chambers”, he explained.

He added that overcrowding in jails causes prisoners to make body contact that stirs up lust “as their emotions, sentiments and sensibilities go haywire. Many come out of prison as homosexuals even though they did not know anything about homosexuality before being incarcerated”, he continued.

The current situation has raised international alarm with members of the European Parliament’s Intergroup on Gay and Lesbian Rights writing a letter of complaint to EU Ambassador Usman Baraya at the federal republic of Nigeria.

The Intergroup on Gay and Lesbian Rights works against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gay rights issues.

The organisation’s president, Michael Cashman, said that immediate action is needed to halt life threatening media harassment of human rights defenders taking place in Nigeria.

He further highlighted that the media crackdown has subjected the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activists in Nigeria in morbid danger.

“Media outlets in the country have been inciting hatred against activists of the NGO House of Rainbow in Lagos, and many of them are scared for their lives. [Some] are hiding or have left the country”, he stressed.

Adaralegbe confirmed that House of Rainbow received a warning that “some ruthless arsonists were coming to fire our brains off in the church. So we all ran away in rampage regardless of our material possessions and solidarity.”

A string of other Nigerian publications continue to probe and publish articles pertaining to the House of Rainbow MCC and slamming homosexuality.