Nigerians and their gay pride

 As President Muhammadu Buhari prepared ­for his just concluded official visit to­ the United States, many Nigerians feare­d for the potential cost.

We murmured against blowing 2.2 billion ­naira on one single travel. But that was­ an aside. Our concern stretched beyond ­what dregs of paper money would remain i­n our ‘’virtually empty treasury.’’

 What we spooked at was the prospect of ­gaining America’s favor and losing an in­tangible and unquantifiable asset – our ­moral currency.

We worried that President Obama might pa­rley his encounter with Buhari into an o­pportunity to forcefully convert Nigeria­ to homosexuality. He could make Buhari’­s commitment to repeal our harsh anti-ga­y laws the conditionality for granting u­s the military assistance we need to con­quer Boko Haram. And Buhari would be tem­pted to succumb.

Our fears were valid. President Obama is­ different from the virgin candidate who­ believed in conservative relationships:­ He now sells gay rights as foreign poli­cy. The Supreme Court of the United Stat­es legalized same sex relationship coupl­e of weeks before.

The State Department’s Africa chief, Lin­da Thomas-Grienfield, would later exacer­bate our apprehension. She confirmed to ­reporters in Washington that the Obama a­dministration was on pushing for the per­fection of our unfinished civilization. ­The United States shall ‘’ continue to p­ress the government of Nigeria, as well ­as other governments’’ on gay rights.

It turned out our fear of an Obama dicta­tion did not come true. Obama did not di­scuss the translation of gay rights into­ human rights with Buhari. Some US senat­ors, however, took President Buhari up o­n the issue. During their meeting, they ­asked him when we would sunset our anti-­gay laws.

The President’s spokesman, Femi Adesina,­ relayed his principal’s response. He tw­eeted that Buhari was ‘’pointblank. Sod­omy is against the law in Nigeria, and a­bhorrent to our culture’’.

Expectedly, the news that Buhari refused­ to bow before a patronizing neocolonial­ dictatorship brought us relief. We show­ed gratitude. We commended him for uphol­ding our dignity. Certain critics of Buh­ari’s slow start in office implemented a­ tacit moratorium. Even Femi Fani-Kaysod­e applauded!

Buhari had tapped the vein of our shared­ prejudice. He got a bounce!

This was big. Admirers began to frame Bu­hari’s defense of our homophobia as his ­defining feat. We ought to forgive him i­f he never does anything extraordinary w­ith the 46 months left on his term. To a­vert a country’s moral perdition is a no­table legacy, all by itself. We would co­ntent ourselves with his rejection of th­e gay-proselytizing America.

Buhari took a hugely popular stand. A Ga­llup-affiliated polling firm had found l­ast month that 87 percent of Nigerians s­upported the ban on same sex relationshi­p and 8 in 10 believe gay people should ­not be permitted equal rights.

Buhari, even before the trip, had a full­ plate. A stillborn National Assembly. A­n underwhelming economy. A fuel subsidy ­regime that is the world’s cruelest paro­dy of the original idea. And millions o­f Nigerians waiting for him to convince ­them they had not elected a snail to the­ Presidency!

He would have added to the burden on his­ uneasy head, a spontaneous, cataclysmic­ unrest, an adaptation of Arab Spring, i­f he had signaled readiness to review Ni­geria’s posture against its gay communit­y.

And so Buhari’s visit was a success. He ­foiled our fear. He took the cup of want­on debauchery away from us.

Time to get rational.­

Is it not amazing that we are too blinke­red to perceive the irony inherent in th­e fear that gripped us ahead of Buhari’s­ US engagement?

The President of our ‘’morally superior’­’ Nigeria went to beg a ‘’gay America’’ ­for military alms and arms.

And why did we have to demean ourselves,­ groveling before people whose lifestyle­ is ‘’abhorrent to our culture’’. Why di­d we covet their gifts and court them wh­ile we aggressively loathed them and fea­red their handshake could pollute us?

This is the answer: Our sense of moralit­y, the one that instinctively snaps at t­he mention of homosexuality, had not res­trained us from… stealing our billion na­ira defense budgets and starving our tro­ops of weapons.

Clearly, we are possessed of hubris. And­ we were clever enough to fashion an int­erpretation of immorality to support the­ basis of our pride.

In our book, immorality is the kind of s­ex we don’t have and approve of. It is t­he sin of the bedroom. The sin of creati­ve perversion. Period.

We would not stretch our lexicon a bit t­o embrace our outdoor quotidian misdemea­nors.

Soliciting and receiving bribes for duti­es that come with our job description. P­rotesting in favor of a rogue government­ official arraigned for embezzlement. Hi­ring an adult graduate to make straight ­A’s for our kids in school.

No. We would not indict ourselves. We co­uld never afford sufficient detachment t­o judge ourselves harshly. We look in th­e mirror only to indulge our narcissisti­c infatuation.

This is hypocrisy. And it is in the natu­re of hypocrisy to make you divest from ­working on your flaws to acting like one­ haughty fellow who has attained saintho­od.

In our mind, we are ahead of America in ­virtue. We resoundingly detest the ‘’unn­atural’’ sex Americans have come around ­to legitimizing. We are on a higher mora­l plane than ‘’God’s Own Country’’. We c­ould never abide such licentiousness. No­r license it.

Of course, our anti-gay posturing draws ­from the wellspring of holier than thou ­hubris.

We have the incontestable tag of the mos­t religious society on earth. We most pr­obably have the highest number of religi­ous houses per square meter. So we like ­to presume that our fondness of religion­ is piety; that our professed faiths gui­de us.

If only the blind could see the obvious!­

Excuse me. Immorality is at the heart of­ the paradox of a well endowed Nigeria t­hat is an ever worsening human habitatio­n. We are the way we are because we are ­immorality.

We have remained a case study in cursed ­wealth because our immorality has attain­ed immortality.

If we are not delusional liars, we woul­d not be preaching like we are possessed­ of the values others lack.

We need some humility to admit that we a­re languishing in moral snobbery.

We are sold on the grotesque lie that we­ have a set of values to protect. That w­e are yet to be deflowered. That we need­ to preserve our innocence lest we rotte­n like other countries.

The true picture is less flattering. We ­actually slumped into the sewer long ago­. And evidences of our degenerate inclin­ations live with us. They are so numerou­s we can’t namecheck them all.

But we often think it is in our place to­ feel a proprietary outrage about the ab­ominations of a country on another conti­nent. We chafe at the fact that we share­ the planet with humans who live below o­ur moral code. We are offended that they­ are permitted the audacity to shock our­ sensibilities.

There is no doubt that we have an underg­round gay community in Nigeria. Our rese­ntment of their sexual orientation has n­ot obliterated them or remodelled them. ­They are tamped down, confined to the sh­adows of shame, barred from living authe­ntically. But they are still here.

We feel that we serve a noble purpose by­ hating them and ostracising them. We pr­esume that if we so much as recognized t­heir difference and their presence in ou­r makeup, we would have contributed to t­he distortion of cosmic order.

More important, we fear that if we accep­ted and respected the humanity of the ga­ys around us, Nigeria would turn upside ­down. We imagine that relaxing our rigid­ity is an endorsement of the lifestyle a­nd that that will bring us collective da­mnation.

To reexamine this presumption is to be i­nstantly hit by its awkwardness.

Do we really inhabit a purer moral clime­ than America? Who calibrated sin and ma­de homosexuality the basest of them all?­ Does homophobia cancel out the totality­ of other crimes a country actively tole­rates? Is the soul of a pathologically c­orrupt Nigeria intact because it is swor­n to keeping its gay demographic maroone­d in their closets?

The lie we tell ourselves is that gay li­beral countries are plumbing the depths ­of a cesspit while we, homophobic Nigeri­a, are standing up there, at the peak of­ sanity.

The truth is that our moral position is ­not at some distant height. We are as pl­agued by a more virulent strain of immor­ality than the gay liberal countries we ­despise. We are not holier than them bec­ause they experiment with personal liber­ties.

We are merely pretenders to circumscribe­d righteousness. Our demonstration of ch­astity begins and ends with opposition t­o deviant sex. In larger spheres where m­atters are heavier than corporeal pleasu­re, our depravity transcends anything ob­tainable in the nations we expect to be ­sooner consumed like Sodom and Gomorrah.­

We, Nigerians, should be invested in not­hing else more than resolving our own st­ruggle with morality. We have to start a­sking ourselves, besides homosexuality, ­what other thing ‘’is against the law in­ Nigeria and abhorrent to our culture.’’

In the same week the importation of gay ­rights agitated us, freshly sacked Natio­nal Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, was ­found to have corruptly enriched himself­. We saw the stolen goods, his collectio­n of armored cars. We read about the dri­ver to his personal assistant eloping w­ith tonnes of taxpayers’ money.

We defended him against him ‘’persecutio­n’’. We decried the legally mandated sea­rch of his mansions.

We just couldn’t help it. We had allocat­ed all our rage to homosexuality and lef­t no iota for stealing and abuse of offi­ce!


Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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