MARTIN SSEMPA AND STEPHEN LANGA VS SMUG: the proxy ideological war is waged in Uganda

Source: http://afrogay.blogspot.com/2009/04/martin-ssempa-and-stephen-langa-vs-smug.html

The battle lines are drawn. On one side is Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) plus its local Ugandan cohorts, and on the other are groups like Colorado-based Wait Training and California-based Abiding Truth Ministries. In many ways, it is a battle of David against Goliath given the stature of the players. But in the Biblical fable, Goliath ended up on the losing end so this is a battle still worth watching.

SMUG is a ragtag organization that gets some funding from Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) organizations in the United States and Europe to host seminars and distribute 'educational' materials. The funding they get supports a skeleton staff of a handful of people and it is not difficult to see that those who run SMUG are not terribly well-to-do people. One of them is a man called David who features prominently on SMUG's website. I once had a run-in with David over a 30,000/= ($15.00) bar tab his people ran up in a bar that he refused to pay ostensibly because he felt that I should have paid it. Never mind about who was wrong or right on the matter; that David felt that there had to even be a discussion (the organization David fronts is affiliated to SMUG, but I believe it is called Integrity Uganda) over a $15 bill should give you an idea of the level of funding SMUG and its affiliates receive.

Now, bring in Martin Ssempa with his Wait Training funders. In 2007 alone, Wait Training is reported to have donated $1m in Denver, Colorado, towards a fund to strengthen marriage. On a minor note, try comparing Wait Training's website to SMUG's; the difference is like chalk and cheese. It is not difficult to see how lopsided the battle is when one considers level of wealth.

While SMUG is a local Ugandan organization with only peripheral foreign support from gay individuals and organizations, Martin Ssempa's entire anti homosexual, anti-prostitution, anti-Aids campaign is funded from Denver Colorado. Martin Ssempa is such a flunky of Wait Training that he lists a phone number (               720-488-8888        ) in Denver, Co, as one of his contacts. If you want to book Martin Ssempa for a speaking engagement, you have to call his affiliates in Denver!

Martin Ssempa's entire website has been created by Wait Training and there is hardly anything of the man, apart from his handsome features, on that site. On the website, Wait Training calls Ssempa "a passionate voice in the global fight against HIV." Global fight against HIV? I asked myself. So, I sought to find out what exactly Ssempa has done in the global fight against HIV. His website lists the following as the highlights of his career:

�Testified before the U.S. congress on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa
� Co-authored Uganda�s abstinence and being faithful policy with Dr. Edward Green of Harvard�s Center for Population and Development Studies
� Was a keynote speaker at Rick and Kay Warren�s �Disturbing Voices� AIDS conference
� Founded the Global Center for Uganda�s ABC strategy
� Served as executive director of Campus Alliance to Wipeout [sic] AIDS (CAWA) Project
� Lauched [sic] and served as pastor to Makerere Community Church (Kampala), a leader in preventing HIV/AIDS among Uganda�s college population
� Earned Sociology degree from Makerere University (Uganda) and Masters in Counseling from Philadelphia Biblical University (USA)
� Became national break dance champion as a youth!

Given the glowing credentials on his front page, I had been thinking that Ssempa the global HIV fighter might be on the same rang as Noerine Kaleeba who single-handedly started The Aids Support Organisation (TASO) in Uganda, and guided it to become a truly influential (and internationally recognized) organization that now boasts Paediatric ART program and Child services, Youth Entrepreneurship Conferences, advocacy work and so on. But, no, Ssempa has made a few speeches here and there and co-authored (read put his name to a publication written by someone else) a few pamphlets.

Wait Training's entire message is in fact directed towards abstinence and sex-only within the confines of marriage, and nowhere on their website do they seem interested in Aids/HIV. Yet Aids/HIV is Ssempa's Trojan Horse in Uganda because he knows that the abstinence/faithfulness in marriage message is a curiosity in Africa in general and Uganda in particular, what with our polygamous and highly charged but secretive sexual ways.

It cannot be lost on Martin Ssempa and his funders that the 'sex before marriage, faithfulness within marriage' is a dud all over the world. It doesn't work in Denver, Colorado and it certainly doesn't work with Uganda's own President Museveni. In the United States, the evangelicals' vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, showed the world that these religious zealots are whistling in the wind when they exhort us all to abstain until marriage, and condemn those who have sex outside wedlock, when Palin's underage daughter illustrated that their own children are at it like rabbits. The revelation that Sarah Palin's teenage daughter was with child was an embarrassing body blow to the evangelical movement, especially coming as it did in the middle of a pivotal presidential campaign. Now, Iowa (Iowa of all places?!!) has just pronounced itself that barring gays from marrying is unconstitutional. The American evangelicals are under siege from all sides and they are frightened, very frightened. For if the battle for ideological supremacy in America is lost, as the election of liberal Barack Obama might suggest, where will they turn?

In Uganda (and Africa in general) they sense that they have a vehicle that can still run; the fight against homosexuality. That is where their agent, Martin Ssempa, comes in. They don't want him to be seen as a one-issue activist so they have created a fa�ade for him that he is leading a global fight against Aids/HIV. His practical record on Aids/HIV is pathetic of course but that is besides the point. When you add the cocktail of Christian religious zealotry, HIV/Aids and youth ministering, you get a lot of religious and governmental support in Africa. In Uganda alone, Ssempa has the direct ear and support of Janet Museveni, Uganda's first lady whom many suggest is more influential than her husband in many respects. Wait Training has got very influential friends in Uganda to help advance their real mission; fundamentalist religious advocacy.

So, it is no accident that Abiding Truth Ministries chose Uganda to send emissaries to discuss how homosexuals can be cured. They knew they would have a receptive audience from the authorities especially after the Ugandan courts of law had dealt the government a deadly blow by declaring that Ugandan gays deserve to have their human rights protected. Justice Arach's words were like a sword in the sides of the evangelicals who fund Martin Ssempa and Stephen Langa. Coming just weeks after America had rejected Sarah Palin at the polls, it was indeed a double whammy against evangelicals.

Their reaction was as swift as it was organized. Within weeks, Abiding Truth Ministries announced a conversion therapy seminar in Uganda and advertised it in the media almost two months before it was due to happen. All friendly media including the government owned New Vision, the web-based UgPulse lent the impending three-day seminar wide coverage, and the highly influential Kampala Pentecostal Church came on board as a partner.

Obviously, SMUG, with its meager resources and stigmatized existence was caught on the back foot. The conversion seminar went ahead amid a lot of fanfare and SMUG could hardly get a word in edge-ways. The less compromised local media outlets (Monitor, Weekly Observer, Capital Radio etc) that had in the past aired SMUG's message have been directly intimidated over the years by President Museveni and his minister of Ethics, Nsaba Buturo, and are now totally cowed. They thus chose to stay silent about both the conversion seminar and SMUG's rebuttals. With no voice, SMUG's disadvantages were glaring.

But Wait Training and Abiding Truth Ministries were not done yet. They used their deeper pockets to hit at SMUG's core vulnerability; lack of money. With just a few dollars here and there to spend on everything they want to, and no coherent organizational skills, it is no wonder that some SMUG members were disgruntled. In addition, corruption in Uganda is almost unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and it stands to reason that the SMUG leaders might have used, or were perceived to have used, some SMUG money for their own personal ends, causing jealousy and resentment amongst their ranks. Disgruntled members like George 'Georgina' Oundo and others were thus easy to pick off by Langa and Ssempa when they came looking for 'converts' because these guys were perennially broke, their existence always desperate, and their prospects always seemed bleak.

They must have resented what they saw as the crumbs of financial support from SMUG. The truth is likely that SMUG couldn't afford to support them to the levels they desired because, though there was some money, it wasn't the fortune that Wait Training and Abiding Truth Ministries are sitting on. But in a country where a $15 entertainment tab seems like a big deal to an organization, the amounts that would have tipped the malcontents to the other side needn't have been much.

Georgina ran to Ssempa and Langa - sashaying, rolling his eyes and hips like a low-class Bebe Zahara Benet - and announced that he had become straight, and had seen the evil of his gay ways. Apocryphal tales of gay recruitment in schools started pouring from his greedy lips and he was joined by Paul Kagaba, a thieving male prostitute who was well known among the gay circles for stealing from the men who paid him 20,000/= ($9.50) a session for sex. All their antics were of course lapped up by the government-owned New Vision but no one else really took these low-life boys seriously because any sensible person could see that they were hungry and gauche, to say the least. So, Ssempa and Langa upped the ante. They demanded names, names, names and Oundo and Kagaba duly obliged. You could hear the high fives slapping as far away as Denver, Colorado when Kagaba and Oundo publicly named names, with Father Musaala as the ultimate one. The New Vision plastered that announcement on the front page and everyone sat up and listened.

The Musaala naming is a spectacular coup for Ssempa because I know for a fact that Ssempa has been trying to bring down Musaala for years (partly because he is jealous that Musaala's Charismatic Renewal movement has such a huge youth following compared to his comparatively obscure Makerere University Community Church) but had failed to get anything tangible to run with. That he was aided in his mission by self-confessed, two-faced and lying homosexuals is moot. The Musaala headline on New Vision's front page was an almighty blow that Ssempa can revel in delivering. In the meantime, SMUG was struggling to make itself heard at a press conference across town that was totally overshadowed by the "Father Musaala is gay" din. In soccer parlance, it was Ssempa 3- SMUG 0. With this latest skirmish, Ssempa has wiped the floor with SMUG, and if the last two weeks were a fish, there seems little doubt that SMUG would throw it back.

The war, though clearly uneven, is not over yet. Musaala has denied being homosexual, the whole story is beginning to ebb away and Musaala might come out stronger than ever after his meetings with his superiors. Anyone who, however, thinks that Ssempa and his Wait Training friends are done is a fool. Already, the Uganda Government is talking about stepping in with legislation, something likely to exercise SMUG and its friends and keep them on the defensive, which is really the intention.

What all this means is that SMUG has to re-think its strategy, improve its communication and accountability to its members and be prepared for a long battle of attrition for the minds of Ugandans on the issue of human rights for gays. There is also a need to coordinate support for SMUG better, something that is obviously difficult given the hostility to SMUG by the government. But supported they need to be because their cause is just. The need is clear and a number of SMUG members have put their very lives on the line by standing up to Ssempa and, therefore, the Uganda government. SMUG has won battles in the past against all odds and that should give encouragement to anyone who might think that the war is over. It isn't.