Tag Archives: Rebecca Kadaga

The Bahati Anti Homosexuality Bill: The Stage Is Set 4

Gay - Political, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

We are finally approaching the denouement to the saga that the Bahati Anti Homosexuality Bill (AHB) has been since 2009. The players are lined up and we must finally see the end to this drama.

The Major Players around Uganda's AHB

The Major Players around Uganda’s AHB

Here is an attempt to summarize what is at stake:

President Yoweri Museveni:

In 2010, following pressure from Hillary Clinton and other Western diplomats, Museveni put his authority on the line and ordered his

Doesn't want the bill: Yoweri Museveni

Doesn’t want the bill: Yoweri Museveni

National Resistance Movement (NRM) members of Parliament (MPs) to drop the bill because it was a matter of ‘foreign policy‘ that was not theirs to resolve. The MPs resentfully capitulated and the bill failed to get out of committee. It lay comatose for nearly three years until Canada’s John Baird resuscitated it with his withering attack on Rebecca Kadaga last October. Museveni must be  irritated that he has to deal with this bill again, especially with the attendant implications for his authority and foreign policy (read foreign Aid) if it is debated and passed.

Museveni has no interest in the AHB, doesn’t want it debated at all, but will now work more quietly to kill it because he can’t employ the public, paternalistic, tactics he used in 2010.

The Parliament of Uganda:

Uganda’s Parliament is overwhelmingly NRM. This 9th Parliament has proved to be more prone to straining at the leash against the executive,  because it has more young(er) MPs who are impatient to assert their authority as Parliamentarians. The problem for them is that too many NRM MPs are still beholden to the president for their seats (a lot of voters really vote NRM because of Museveni, rather than the MP) so they haven’t got enough guts to stand their ground when the president clips them behind the ear, passes them a few sweeteners or threatens them with political annihilation should they not fall into line.  You sense that more of them are increasingly ready to try and use the AHB to give Museveni a bloody nose and so you will see them attempt to debate and pass it.

Rebecca Kadaga

Her authority on the line: Rebecca Kadaga

Her authority on the line: Rebecca Kadaga

Kadaga nailed her colors to the AHB in an ill-advised attempt to bolster her presidential ambitions. At a stroke, she compromised her office which is supposed to be neutral and she also put herself directly in the cross-hairs of President Museveni who cannot have taken too kindly to her thinly veiled shot across the bows at his administration.

He stared her down when she led her Parliamentary troops up the hill because of the death in unclear circumstances of a young Parliamentarian, Selina Nebanda. Museveni insisted that there was no need to recall Parliament over that controversy and, despite her earlier blustering that Parliament would be recalled, Kadaga led her troops back down.

Already wounded by the skirmish with Yoweri Museveni over Selina Nebanda’s death, Kadaga’s authority will be damaged irreparably if the AHB  never makes it to the floor of Parliament. She will thus do whatever she can to at least have the bill debated on the floor. She must be looking for every avenue to save herself further political humiliation, having promised and failed to deliver the AHB as a 2012 Christmas present.

The Evangelical/right  vs the Liberal/Left foreign legion:

It is true that the bill was conceived with the support of American evangelicals such as Scott Lively. But they hadn’t reckoned with the

Private Courts Inc justifies their actions which led to the closure of Victoria University

Private Courts Inc justifies their actions which put 200 Ugandan students and their lecturers out on the streets

fierce backlash from Liberal/Left leaning organizations who took up the mantle and have, since the AHB was introduced in 2009, done whatever they can to guide the message as well as the tactics against their right-wing foes in America and the government authorities in Uganda.

To these two enemies, the AHB is but a mere Trojan Horse for their left/right  ideological battle for hearts and minds. Uganda is but one of the battlefields on which they will fight to the death. Others are Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria, Ghana and so on. The American evangelicals started the battle in Uganda but have since lost ground due to their domestic flock getting cold feet at the idea that they could be responsible for the judicial killing of citizens in foreign places. They also don’t have the stomach to withstand the ferocity of the liberals’ response especially given that the American political climate has clearly turned against right-wing extremism as shown by Barack Obama’s resounding trouncing of the Republicans in successive elections.

The East African has an example of the left’s unrepentantly agenda-driven, personal, ruthless, egotistic, condescending, colonial, take-no-prisoners attitude that they bring to the internecine ideological battle. In that instance, one individual from a company calling itself Private Courts Inc.  pressured Victoria University to close, without bothering to consult the LGBTI community in Uganda, thereby putting the future of 200 students and their lecturers s in jeopardy, and creating the wrong impression that the LGBTI community in Uganda didn’t care what happened to anyone else as long as their agenda was put on a pedestal.

In fact the LGBTI in Uganda, some of whom have friends at the university, found out who the prime mover had been when The East African’s article was published, weeks after the fact. The Private Courts Inc. personnel who wrote the haranguing e-mail to Victoria University last visited Uganda in 2011 but she doesn’t hesitate to lecture anyone and everyone she doesn’t agree with as though she is the Alpha and Omega of the poor, helpless, downtrodden black gay boys and girls in Uganda that she must save from a fireball of hate and bigotry. She clings to a patronizing and racist attitude she would never use had she been dealing with any African-American community in the United States. But, hey, she is a self-appointed white savior from San Francisco who knows better than all the backward black African people in a “tiny country” so her superiority makes her best suited to decide what is good for them.

It is clearly not only the evangelicals using the AHB for their own egoistic reasons.

Uganda’s LGBTI Community:

Just a pawn in the ideological war: David Bahati

Just a pawn in the ideological war: David Bahati

Last, and least, is the LGBTI community in Uganda. Even though they are the people who will bear the brunt of the effects of the AHB, events  have evolved over the last 4 years in such a way as to make the gay community but a parenthesis in the various power and ideological battles the bill has spawned.

The fact that the West is funding all the LGBTI activities in Uganda makes the people on the ground but mere marionettes. Yes, that means that Martin Ssempa and David Bahati are as much a tool of the American evangelicals as the Ugandan LGBTI community are of the left/liberal camps in the West.

It is a noble fight that the LGBTI activists are fighting in Uganda but it is also, sadly, true that very little of what is going on in Uganda’ corridors of power, in San Francisco’s Private Courts Inc.  or at Scott Lively’s Abiding Truth Ministries is driven by the realities of the gay population on the ground who are but mere pawns in much bigger, and sometimes tangential,  political games.

The activists must, of course, keep lobbying Parliament (I think the message and tone need to be adjusted but that is another discussion) and keep engaging with anyone they can on the AHB. The alternative would be to give up; infinitely worse given how much they have already put into the fight.

When all is said and done, the Anti Homosexuality Bill’s fate can only be decided once and for all if A) President Museveni finds a way of getting it thrown out of Parliament for good, B) Uganda’s Parliament comes to its senses and rejects it out on their own volition or  C) it is debated and passed and it goes to court for a final, legal, ruling on its constitutionality.

If Parliament stands its ground, Yoweri Museveni’s options are limited. In that happenstance, the solution to this protracted battle will be for Parliament to pass the bill, and the courts take it up, thereby finally taking the opportunistic politics out of play.

 

UPDATE/CORRECTION: After I posted this, it has been brought to my attention that the Private Courts person, Melanie Nathan, who wrote the e-mail to Victoria University has actually never been to Uganda.

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Health/Wellness needs to drive the human rights campaign 7

Gay - Human Rights, Gay Social • Tags: , , , , , ,

Frank McMullan has posted a fierce riposte to my article decrying what I see as gross exaggerations regarding the homosexuality debate in Uganda.

I  feel it might be beneficial to move the discussion forward by explaining further (or again?) why I am frustrated with the nature of the debate being conducted around Uganda’s gay situation.

My general thrust is simple: human rights are critical and those who fight for them need our support and thanks. What seems to me to be happening in Uganda is that the foreign friends of our gay community have decided that they are going to fight this battle on their own terms. Some of their condescending tactics include treating us (Ugandan gay men and women) as though we are helpless, hapless basket cases who cannot come up with any strategies and so all the strategies must be determined by them  in New York City or talking shops in Quebec. How else can you explain the attack by Canada’s foreign minister against Speaker of the House, Rebecca Kadaga, last October, an attack that caught gays in Uganda totally by surprise?

So, when we tell the activists abroad that we feel things should be done differently, they simply brush our opinions away and go with their own decisions.

To be fair, our representatives in Uganda haven’t been terribly forthcoming in seeking out the views of the grassroots [Farug has taken some steps to change in this regard over the past 12 months]. Yet the overwhelming sentiments on the ground are that the struggle is about what three or four people in Uganda plus their handlers in London, Washington, DC and Europe decide.

No wonder that many of us look on with awe as activists, some of them carrying fictitious members lists,  fly all over the world, return to Uganda only long enough to throw yet another expensive boozy junket and then fly out again to … yet more talking shops on yet another continent.

How do these activists know what message to take to all these places if, as is certainly the case, they hardly ever consult with the grassroots? we wonder. To that end, some of the activists in Uganda have been compromised by the endless foreign trips whose purpose to us remains at best nebulous. But our boys and girls are so poor and desperate that these trips seem like manna from heaven. They are thus a source of a lot of envy and jealousy in our community and, dare one say it, they make the gallivanting activists so powerful as nothing funded by foreign donors (everything is funded by foreign donors)  is approved or done without their nod.

The foreign liberal and right-wing media corp who report on Uganda usually have an agenda that often has nothing to do with the poor gay boy in Kawaala, a Kampala suburb. Yet, as we all know, the truth is usually far less interesting than we would wish. When they air what is usually arrant hyperbole (often endorsed by people on the ground who also have their own personal reasons for embellishing their circumstances), the Americans, Swedes and Brits etc. get all excited … but the heterosexual Ugandans who have nothing against us also get irritated at what they see as lies, lies, lies.

We might be getting a lot of sympathy from people watching exaggerated reports in the comfort of their living rooms in London, Lisbon and Los Angeles. But we are also needlessly making enemies of our fellow Ugandans, the people we walk the streets with, because the stuff being peddled out there, often with the tacit blessing of those who lead us, is manifestly incorrect.

I have, for instance, railed against the nonsense Scott Mills’ documentary (May 2011) peddled. He spent perhaps two weeks in Uganda and called it the worst place to be gay in the world – to deafening silence from our leadership. Really? Worse than Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates?  Worse than the parts of Northern Nigeria practicing Shariah law? Worse than North Dakota or parts of rural Georgia? Seriously?

I think our representatives, too, cannot really deviate from the message their sponsors want to hear because … it would be to bite the hand that feeds them. He who pays the piper calls the tune and the piper wants sensational stories from Uganda because that is what generates dollars and Euros. There is,however,  only a number of stories even a “terrible” country like Uganda can produce so … the alternative is to either embellish or look on as outright fabrications are peddled by whoever has an agenda to pursue.

So, contrary to what a commentator on my previous post patronizingly suggested when she offered that  James Onen (the radio personality) can’t understand what is going on in Russia., Onen is right: this battle long ceased to be about the truth.

If it were about the truth and what the gay boys and girls in Uganda really want, the focus would be on forcing the government of Uganda to make HIV/Aids in the gay community a priority since the fact that we are already dying from diseases due to official neglect is as verifiable as it is indisputable. And what would be a better way to push the government to concede that gays in Uganda must be protected than to give them equal access to medical attention as well as specialized HIV care?

This is not happening because the focus in the West is on a bill that hasn’t been debated, hasn’t killed anyone yet, likely will not change the situation on the ground since, once passed, the law will be impossible  to enforce.  But it should really be on sick homosexual Ugandans who can’t trust the clinics available to them to keep their confidences,  provide them with simple things such as lubricant or treat their sexually transmitted diseases without turning up their noses at them.

Any Ugandan gay man or woman will readily tell you about gay people they know of who have succumbed to HIV/Aids due to neglect and/or stigma which prevented them from seeking medical attention in time. I have blogged about a friend of mine, Raymond Kiwanuka, who was taken in that fashion. He wasn’t the first, and he certainly hasn’t been the last. Raymond suffered without support long before Bahati introduced his [Nazi] bill.

What I am arguing is that the HIV/Aids crisis in the gay community needs to be used as the vehicle to fight against discrimination and the Bahati Bill. Why? Because thus far, the ‘human rights’ “we are here, we are queer” message has remained nebulous, and its intentions unclear. So, it needs to be dressed up in clothes that both gay and straight Ugandans can identify with – the human element of health/wellness which is tangible to most Ugandans.

My friends, most of whom know I am gay and don’t care, often ask what I think are justifiable questions: what rights do Ugandan gays want? To march in the streets? To have parades in public parks? To hold seminars in hotels? To have sex in public? To discuss gay sex on radio and television? To take over mainstream bars and hang by the rafters? To have sex in private, something they are already doing? What?

Unless we put a human element to what we want, and I am totally convinced HIV/Aids/Health-Wellness is the perfect vehicle for this message, my friends can justifiably assume that we think we are more special than the millions of Ugandan women and children who have died over the years due to pregnancy and childbirth complications, but who don’t have friends in Stockholm or New York City, and have thus never had an advocate such as Hillary Clinton making threatening phone calls on their behalf  to President Yoweri Museveni.

With that in mind, it might make for exciting water cooler discussions in America and Europe to claim that there is a violent anti-gay movement in Uganda. The evidence on the ground proves otherwise and that sort of exaggeration merely alienates our fellow Ugandans.

It’s time , I think, to retool our message to embrace the really pressing health/wellness issues affecting the gay Ugandans in the slums of Bwayise and Najjanankumbi. It might not be as jazzy, sexy, catchy or lucrative as the “we are here, we are queer” message, but I would bet cold, hard cash that is what the grassroots want.

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2012 gone – bring on 2013 9

Gay - Political, Gay Rights - The Struggle • Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

2012 is behind us so it is time to think about what to expect in 2013. On occasions like this, it’s best to let one’s mind wander and not try to be terribly structured.

2012 is a year Uganda’s Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, will not look back on with unbridled pleasure. When she rose to the post of Speaker in 2011, Kadaga mounted and rode a wave of public disgruntlement against Yoweri Museveni’s tired, uncaring, thieving, bungling administration, and impressed even die-hard skeptics, such as yours truly, with her crusading zeal to put “country first.” Openly warring with Museveni’s Squealer-like puppet, Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi, Kadaga emboldened the ruling NRM caucus in Parliament and hitherto docile parliamentarians started asking pointed questions about their own government’s wanton corruption, fecklessness,  lack of new ideas and drift.

Kadaga was repelled by Mbabazi

Rebecca Kadaga was repelled by Amama Mbabazi

Alas, Kadaga then came a-cropper when she was lured into consorting with convicted felons over the Bahati [Nazi]Anti-Gay Bill. She promised the bill to Martin Ssempa who had just been convicted of fabricating sodomy evidence against a rival pastor – for Christmas – and then failed to deliver it. Thanks to events running away from Kadaga, time run out on the Bahati [Nazi) Bill in 2012, not least because the President, who we all know is against the bill, chose to use up an entire afternoon the bill could have been debated to indulge in ... gossip. Kadaga thus lost her last opportunity in 2012 to deliver her [Nazi] Christmas gift to Martin Ssempa and with it went her credibility where political maneuvering is concerned.

Museveni: took up precious Parliamentary time in December to "gossip"

Museveni: took up precious Parliamentary time in December to “gossip”

Kadaga got a political bloody nose in 2012, which the death of her octogenarian father did not help. She will come back again in 2013, and you can expect her to continue making noises about this and that. She has, however, already showed that she is prone to moving her political chess pieces without a lot of thought and will, going forward, struggle to maintain her moral high ground given her failure to deliver on what should have been an easy bill to pass in 2012. She of course, should be advised to steer her office clear of political controversy as well as be more discreet about her political ambitions, but only time will tell whether she is willing to play a more subtle form of politics.

Frank Mugisha & Kasha Nabagesera

The faces of gay Uganda: Frank Mugisha & Kasha Nabagesera

2012 has been a spectacularly successful year for Ugandan gay rights activists, thanks largely to events that have been driven by others. To the activists’ direct credit, 2012 saw Uganda’s first ever gay pride march in Entebbe which was eventually broken up by the police. Yours truly doesn’t believe in such things as pride marches because they go against his sensibilities. But it is not lost on him that parades serve a useful ‘public awareness’ purpose especially when activism is faced with boorish, foolish, intemperate, obtuse and tactless foes such as Uganda’s current Minister of Ethics and Integrity, defrocked Catholic priest Simon Lokodo.

Lokodo should really have known to leave activists well alone when they met in hotels and public gardens because, of course, they were doing no harm even if they didn’t have the right to assemble which they did. But, no, he kept on charging in there, likely tipped off by someone inside the gay camp on at least one occasion,  like a bull in a China store which of course played right into the gay advocates’ hands. Still, even after conferences were disrupted and a couple of gay-themed plays were stymied, one got the feeling that the gay debate in Uganda had stalled, that the public weren’t interested in it. The activists’ tactics on the ground weren’t really producing the kind of impact they wanted.

A lot of Ugandans on Facebook clearly need an education

A lot of Ugandans on Facebook clearly need an education

All that changed of course when John Baird confronted Rebecca Kadaga in Quebec in late October. The furor that incident unleashed reverberated around the world, thanks to Kadaga’s intemperate, impolitic and, dare one say it, totally over-the-top response when she returned home.

So, due to foreign intervention, the last three months of 2012 have generated some of the most heated debates around homosexuality Uganda has ever witnessed – on local radio, in the papers, and most especially on social media in cyberspace. Baird’s harangue thus proved to be a godsend to the limping gay cause in Uganda in ways he likely didn’t expect.

Ruled for gay rights: Justice Stella Arach Amoko

Ruled for gay rights: Justice Stella Arach Amoko

Where to next? The Bahati bill remains in Parliament and will be passed by Parliament if it is debated regardless of what local activists and our friends abroad do. So, the way forward is to find a way for the bill not to be debated on the floor of Parliament or to prepare for a constitutional challenge if it is passed.

My own feeling is that the bill should be debated and passed so that it can be challenged in the courts. This would serve to take it out of the political arena and, hopefully, draw a line under the [mostly cynical] jockeying by both friends and detractors which has helped shape public debate, yes, but which has also left the core issues unresolved.

A lot of well-schooled Ugandans remain astonishingly illiterate on the homosexuality issue and so need an education. Raising the debate to a more intellectual, highbrow, legal, level will give a lot of our brothers and sisters who have gone to school but remain ignorant a different, less hysterical and/or hackneyed perspective.

The other reason this issue needs to go to court is precedent;  the gay side in Uganda has never lost a legal ruling in the three or four times gay activists have taken our enemies to court in the recent past. With such great odds, I would bet my last cent that the Bahati Bill would be ruled unconstitutional in less time than it takes to say “bigoted.” But first it has to be passed for the courts to consider any challenges.

Is it risque parades we are after?

Is  flaunting it at parades what we are after?

The activists on the ground should also continue to expect questions about what exactly they want to achieve. I have asked the questions and continue to hear them being asked by others in more muted tones.

Are they looking for acceptance in Uganda? If so, what form should it take? Is it about gay marriage? Every sinew in my body tells me it shouldn’t be and I haven’t heard any Ugandan activist argue that marriage is what it’s about so we can dismiss that line of thought. Or can we?

Is it about gay men and women being allowed to love each other freely (in private) in Uganda? What about those, like yours truly, who feel we are already doing that in the broad context of the inhibited sexual sensibilities in Uganda?

Is it about putting it out there, on the airwaves, in public parks, in bars and on the streets as one sees in San Fransisco’s Castro District? If so, how do we hope to cut and paste that model into a country like Uganda where heterosexuals frown upon flaunting their own relationships?

Or is it about attaining equal access to social services such as HIV/Aids treatment  and other health and wellness programs which heterosexuals already take for granted?

Is it about lifting the confidence of gay men and women all over the country to believe in themselves enough to pool together to set up gay venues (bars, clubs etc) that they call their own?

In other words, with and without help from our friends abroad, for whom and for what are we making all this noise in the press, in conferences around the world, in dramatic stage productions, on podiums accepting accolades, in television debates with a lunatic Martin Ssempa?

If the struggle is not really about those who front it, because most struggles are usually larger than those who front them, do those we assume to be representing really know what it is we are trying to do for them, and have they bought into the agenda we espouse? How have we ensured that they are on board with what we are trying to achieve?

If we were to take a poll of gay Ugandans today, how confident are we that they would all be able to say in one sentence what gay activism in Uganda is about?

What will the matrix of success following all this gay activism in Uganda be? What will need to happen  (and to whom) in order for us to say that the gay struggle in Uganda has succeeded?

When I speak to gay men and women from all walks of life in Uganda, I get the impression that those are the broad questions whose answers they still want clearly articulated.

The communication chasm between leaders and led still needs to be bridged.

Still.

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Mike Mukula delivers a clanger! 7

Gay - Political, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , ,

2016 Presidential Aspirant, Mike Mukula, is a very interesting man.

Accused of having pilfered Global Alliance for Vaccines (GAVI) funds while he was state minister for health, Mike Mukula wrote a check for 240m/= ($100,000) as recompense. This, despite having initially denied anything to do with the theft of GAVI funds. So, it should perhaps be assumed that, even if he was innocent, Mukula was struck by a bolt of kindness and he decided to write GAVI a $100,000 check. Believe me, you won’t find many Ugandans who are that generous, and especially not ones who have held high office as Mukula has done.

Forever dapper: Mike Mukula

Forever dapper: Mike Mukula

It must thus be with the same magnanimity that Mukula decided to wade into the homosexuality debate. Check him out here telling the youth to shun homosexual activity because it constitutes an adoption of a foreign culture.

Odd as it might sound, I agree with Mukula. I, a Ugandan gay man of so many years (well, I have never really been anything else), also don’t want Ugandan youth to take up homosexual practices. How can that be good for them when they still have their education to complete on top of all the other challenges they face in an increasingly ruthless world?

It is when Mukula talks about Ugandan (African?) culture and homosexuality as mutually exclusive that I get a little lost. Can a man who is that smart, intellectually and sartorially, really be serious that homosexuality is alien to Uganda? Mike Mukula surely knows about gay chiefs and kings in Uganda’s past. He also cannot be oblivious to gay government officials and ex-officials, who dabble in gay sex or have dabbled in gay sex in their past, walking Uganda’s streets today. If I know about them, the very well-connected Mukula must know them, too.

So, Mukula is either being deliberately obtuse or he, too, has fallen prey to the Rebecca Kadaga syndrome; that of opening his mouth without thinking through the long-term implications of his words.

Of course he is right to caution the youth against homosexual activity – they have the rest of their lives after they reach the age of maturity to explore that.

But for an educated man of his ilk to think that homosexuality is somehow a sign of a foreign culture?

I don’t get that, Mike, I really don’t.

Which brings me to the question that keeps me awake at night; why don’t these politicians simply shut up about matters of sexuality if all they do when they open their traps is embarrass themselves with ignorant, if not hypocritical, statements?

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When is the price for publicity too high?

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Oscar Wilde gets another Ugandan follower: Andrew Mwenda

Oscar Wilde gets another Ugandan follower: Andrew Mwenda

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about at all”

Thus proclaimed Oscar Wilde, more than 100 years ago. More salient and incisive words couldn’t have been spoken by a more tortured soul in the fraught times for homosexuals that Wilde experienced in Victorian England.

Uganda’s Andrew Mwenda picked up the same theme last week and, in a one-thousand-word-article,  argued that the Red Pepper’s gay pornography of the past two weeks is actually a godsend to the gay community in Uganda.

“But of course!” anyone with a remote understanding of the value of publicity would argue, and indeed yours truly has argued so for years now. So, Andrew Mwenda is right about that point.

However, the question has to be … when is the price for publicity too high? Given the near-blanket coverage of the Bahati Nazi anti-gay bill over the last three years, and the din that it has generated over the last four weeks, did Ugandan families really have to be treated to Chris Mubiru’s pornographic recordings for breakfast, lunch and dinner? Should we, therefore, see the images of a middle-aged man having sex with a young man barely out of his teens as the icing on the gay publicity cake?

Why then do I feel more depressed about the graphic sex images than Andrew Mwenda wants me to feel? Might it be because it’s fairly apparent to me that the Red Pepper knew that the porn they were printing would serve no other purpose other than to destroy the lives of two people even as it made the paper’s editors a lot of money?

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Ugandan politician rubbishes the Bahati [Nazi] Bill 3

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Not all Uganda’s politicians are blinkered, and here is one who makes the case for the Bahati [Nazi] anti-gay bill to be thrown out of Parliament in its entirety. I don’t think you will see a more erudite and considered case for permanently getting rid of this bill from a Ugandan politician:

Money quote: from Morris Ogenga-Latigo:

The truth is that homosexuality is a social phenomenon that hinges on both a person’s genetic constitution and the social environment to which one is exposed, and is as old as humanity. Contrary to the lies peddled by defenders of the bill, homosexually-oriented people have always been part of our African society.

In my Acholi community, they were never outrightly rejected but were instead quietly helped to cope. Even the story of Kabaka Mwanga and his martyrdom of Christians has a homosexuality twist to it. It must also be made clear that homosexuality is completely different from sexual abuse by perverted and mentally deranged men who sexually molest babies, lure and sexually abuse young girls and boys (the Mubiru way), rape fellow men, or even practise bestiality.

Rather than the compassion, love and care in normal same sex relationships, theirs is abomination and heartache that no culture on earth tolerates. Secondly, the bill as it is ? “Anti-homosexuality Bill” ? is no more than a piece of hate legislation.

We now wait with bated breath for Uganda’s other political leaders to respond to this bill. It will be the ultimate dereliction of responsibility for leaders such as Beti Kamya, Mugisha Muntu, Janet Museveni, Beti Nambooze, Semujju Nganda, Ken Lukyamuzi, Olara Otunnu etc. to let this bill pass (or not) without their views on it being put on record. If it is a good bill for the country, let’s hear their counter arguments to Ogenga Latigo. If not, let’s hear their support for him.

The remaining alternative is for them to maintain their silence – not a criminal offense but a sign of moral cowardice surely.

Over to you honorable members of Uganda’s ruling elite.

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Questions the anti-gay brigade struggles to answer 3

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No bill: Ugandan girls walking around in the nude

No bill: Ugandan girls walking around in the nude

Now and then, it helps to revisit the questions that we would like those supporting the Bahati [Nazi] anti-gay bill to answer. We’ve asked them ad nauseam but I am not aware that a coherent response has ever been provided anywhere.

1. The Bahati Bill was not a result of a spike in “gay recruitment in schools” or a threat to the family as is claimed. So, what prompted it? Money? There is a lot of money to be made by Christian evangelicals such as Martin Ssempa who will gladly fight, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the proxy morality fight already lost in the United States. His vested interest and that of the people who pay his way is well documented.

Peripatetic Rebecca Kadaga - this time visiting the Pope at the Vatican

Pushing for bill: peripatetic Rebecca Kadaga – this time visiting the Pope at the Vatican

2. Do you know that under this bill, everyone in Uganda who knows a gay man/woman is at risk of a 3-year jail term if they don’t hand them in to the police? Did you also know that priests, counselors, doctors and parents are also mandated to turn in anyone they discover is gay? When did we last read about such stuff, “read” because most of us are too young to have seen it first hand? Does Nazi Germany ring any bells?

3. The Uganda government’s own figures show that 176 girls were molested by their male relatives last year. Those are the ones on record and it stands to reason that the true number is much higher. Do you know of even a faintly comparable statistic on the gay side? What then makes Bahati claim that gays are a threat to Uganda?

4. Ugandans (and their president, Museveni) keep on arguing that they don’t like the “flaunting it.” What sort of

Junket straight ladies flaunting it: Zari and Sylvia Owori

No Bill: Junket straight ladies flaunting it: Zari and Sylvia Owori

flaunting it in Uganda have they seen anywhere that requires Parliament to enact a law? Anything near what one sees with the ladies of the night at Speke Hotel or on the drink junkets on boat cruises on Lake Victoria? I have done most, if not all, the night clubs in Kampala, sometimes from Wednesday through Sunday and I have never seen a gay couple or a semblance of a gay couple ‘flaunting it.’ Am I looking in the wrong places?

5. How exactly do you recruit someone into any kind of sexuality? Would you make the same argument if a woman of 45 lured a boy of 15 into her bosoms and he went along? Or should we argue that this would be okay since she would be recruiting him into the ‘normal’ sexuality? If not, why isn’t Uganda also enacting a separate law for that sort of thing?

6. Child molestation/preying on the young (gay or straight) is already a crime on Uganda’s books. Why does Uganda need an additional law specifically targeting gays for stuff that both gay and straight people are capable of doing?

Conservative? Ugandan women routinely dispense with knickers

No bill: Ugandan women are increasingly caught out with no knickers

Finally, is Uganda really a conservative country? Do you remember happily married Gen. Kazini (RIP) and how he died in the bedsit of a mistress in the wee hours of the morning? Conservative? How about the recent Zari/Bad Black et al shenanigans? Conservative? Is the way girls dress in Club Rouge (micro-minis, roof high LBTs, no knickers, breasts hanging out etc.) reminiscent of the olden days that you want to see continue in Uganda? Do you know that there are night clubs in the heart of Kampala that host live sex shows (straight) if you have just 20,000/= ($7.00) for the entrance? Conservative? Really?

Or should we argue that Ugandans are conservative because they attend church in record numbers?

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A 16-year old Ugandan gets it on the Bahati [Nazi] anti-gay bill 4

Gay - Human Rights, Gay - Political • Tags: , , , , , ,

First you are blown away by the quality of writing – which tells you immediately that this is an exceptional young man. Then you are floored by the flawless reasoning.

Here is a very thoughtful piece from a 16-year-old Ugandan, a young man who puts the idiocy of the Bahati Bill and many Ugandans who support it in their place. And, no, this young man obviously didn’t attend Uganda’s Universal Primary Education:

*****************************************

It is easy for most Africans to blame their government for any national or political immorality, justice, and corruption. As stated in one of my previous blog posts, the Ugandan populace should feel no different. However, in light of the recent publicity surrounding the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, I point a finger towards not only to the government, but also to the Ugandan people.

Last month, Rebecca Kadaga was involved in a row with Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird over gay rights at a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Quebec. When she returned home, Ms. Kadaga was met by [hundreds] of Anti-Homosexual leaders and supporters. This began the Speaker’s quest to ensure the enforcement of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill by the end of the year. The bill is meant to heighten the already severe consequences of homosexual acts or any support of homosexuality, meriting life in prison and even death in some cases. Earlier this week, Kadaga said that “Ugandans want that law as a Christmas gift. They have asked for it and we’ll give them that gift.” Having grown up there, I can attest to the extreme conservative climate present in Uganda. It is understandable that Ugandans would be hesitant in accepting homosexuality. That being said it doesn’t justify the attempted detainment and/or eradication of gays. This is an issue of human rights, a subject that Uganda has struggled with for decades. Citizens should be more empathetic.

The fact that the government is essentially harboring the systematic extermination of homosexuals is absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable, especially in the progressive world we live in today. Although, regardless of Kadaga’s big words, the likelihood of the bill passing is low, due to Uganda’s dependence of foreign aid and investment. The global community has expressed its strong positions against the bill and countries like the UK have already frozen their aid to the African country. Economically, “Uganda is still a colony,” says my father.

But even if the law isn’t officially instituted, the real tragedy is the number of Ugandans in favor of it. That a people could be so ruthless as to support the killing of thousands for something that is out of human control, that a people could be so closed-minded that they would harbor the detainment and death of thousands due to their sexuality or support of something that contradicts their personal beliefs, speaks volumes and will ultimately determine the progression of that people. That a people can preach love in their respective religions and campaign for peace from their government, while they simultaneously rally for the execution of the innocent, is the height of hypocrisy, and reveals the corruptions that exist within in the church.

Whereas religion should serve a peaceful and harmonious celebration of common beliefs, it is instead a way to justify savagery. Many Ugandans argue that homosexuality is an attack on the institution of marriage but I doubt that their mere existence acts as a threat to anyone or anything. Uganda has been plagued with a warped Christianity and it is this corruption that will limit its progression. Countless nationals have long criticized their governments for being ruthless, corrupt, and unjust, however. As this episode can show us, Ugandans are not much different from their leadership. So, before casting stones at the likes of Amin, Obote, and Museveni, it would be who of them, to asses their own sin.

(Kalanzi Kajubi)

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The Red Pepper prints gay porn on its front page 15

Red Pepper, Social Commentary • Tags: , , , , , ,

Uganda desperately needs press regulation!

As most people in Britain know, the British press is  on the back foot following revelations of  misconduct by a number of journalists from various newspapers over the years. The revelations led to an inquiry by a man called Lord Leveson into press [mis]conduct. The short of it is that the press in Britain have been ordered to come up with a way of regulating themselves so that the invasion of privacy and other unacceptable misconduct on their part is halted.

But now check out the sordid, putrid, stuff from more than 3,000 miles away that a tabloid in Uganda, called the The Red Pepper, has emblazoned on its front page:

oh dear red_pepper_ug_headline a

Mothers and children woke up to this edition of Uganda’s Red Pepper this morning.

Yours truly has blanked out the faces of the protagonists but the Red Pepper saw no need for such caution. While there are a lot of questions to be asked about the pictures themselves, not least of which is how they ended up with the Red Pepper, what has Uganda come to whereby these kinds of pornographic images are served up to families for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

The inside spread

The inside spread

I had to think twice about whether I wasn’t feeding into the frenzy by publishing the pictures on here but, as a friend from another forum has already pointed out, they are already making a splash everywhere so it is not as though I am revealing something new. Indeed, reproducing them is necessary in order for the world to understand the depths of depravity Uganda’s journalism has plumbed.

Anti-gay activists in Uganda routinely use children in their campaigns

Anti-gay activists in Uganda routinely use children in their campaigns

It is not the first time this kind of thing has made the front pages of the Red Pepper. The only difference is that this time it is gay porn being peddled to men, women and children in broad daylight. But the Red Pepper has victimized all sorts of people, mostly straight couples it must be admitted, with utterly scurrilous pornographic  images that should never have seen the light of day.

Imagine what is to become of the young man in the pictures! Even if this wasn’t Uganda where anything gay conjures up [wrong] images of marauding thugs breaking down doors to search for acts of sodomy, how can any editor ever have thought that there was any public interest in printing these images?

What on earth has this country come to?

Oh Uganda ….!!!!

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Rebecca Kadaga trapped between a rock and hard place! 7

Gay - Political, Uganda - Politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Speaker of the House: Rebecca Kadaga

Not a lot of people know or realize it just yet but Uganda’s Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga is in political trouble.

Needled by a meddlesome do-gooder, Canada’s John Baird, over the death of a gay activist in 2011, Kadaga lashed out at him, shrilly lecturing him that Uganda is not a Canadian colony or protectorate. That went down extremely well in Uganda and, in hindsight, John Baird likely regrets the ill-considered way he confronted Kadaga.

It would have been alright if that had been the end of the matter.

Upon her return to Uganda, however, events spiraled out of Kadaga’s control when, upon landing at Entebbe Airport, she found the rabidly homophobic David Bahati, Martin Ssempa and James Elspeth Nsaba Buturo waiting to greet her as though she were a Ugandan Joan of Arc. It all went to her head and she forgot that as a Parliamentary Speaker she cannot be seen to be taking sides on political issues. She pompously announced that she would make sure that the anti-gay bill passed, the country wanted it, and so on and so forth. With every high-minded pronouncement, Kadaga was digging herself into a deeper hole. Now she is in a mess she likely wouldn’t be in if she hadn’t shot her mouth off like a Kalashnikov.

How so?

Kadaga really does want to be president of Uganda. If you doubt this, check out this telling New Vision interview she gave recently on the subject. Her reticence, some might argue ‘downright refusal’ to rule herself out of the presidential running, speaks huge volumes.

But the elections are still 4 years away and sane minds are justifiably asking themselves if it was/is wise for Kadaga to reveal her political cards so soon.

Country First … about time, too, after 26 years!

Remember that Kadaga has been at loggerheads with the Prime Minister, Amama Mbabazi, who is the president’s right hand man mostly over what she sees as their mal-administration and scant attention to the countriy’s most pressing priorities such as health, education and infrastructural development. In effect, she has been at odds with the president himself and, indeed, the president has had to intervene more than twice to separate the two when the internecine fighting spilled over into the press.

We all know that Kadaga thinks her government isn’t putting the ‘country first’ as evidenced by the telling caption she has on her Facebook page. That maxim strikes a chord with most Ugandans who are fed up with the wanton thieving, kleptocratic, selfish, bombastic but hollow leadership that characterizes every facet of Museveni’s 26-year-old government. So, Kadaga is on safe ground when she calls for the country to be put first …

At last, here is a politician from the ruling party calling out her own government albeit in veiled tones.

But Mbabazi and Museveni are not going to go away simply by Kadaga craftily using Facebook captions to dig at their incompetence and impunity. They have been around long enough to know that elections are not won 4 years in advance and so they can afford to wait for Kadaga to make mistakes.

She seems to have made one with the Bahati bill because whether it passes or not, Kadaga cannot come out the other side smelling of roses.

If the Bahati Bill doesn’t pass by Christmas, she will look foolish after her near-hysterical hullabaloo about it and the bizarre bed fellows she allowed her office to be associated with in the name of passing it. Right now, everyone is looking at the calendar, waiting to see if Kadaga can deliver the Christmas gift she promised Martin Ssempa, the convicted felon, and his motley crew of conniving pastors.

If the bill passes by Christmas, then Kadaga has to live by her claim that Uganda can do without foreign aid if the donors follow through with their pledge to withdraw their financial support to the country. Remember that the gay lobby is now the most powerful single minority entity in Uganda and, rightly or wrongly, has forced Museveni to his knees several times. So, when donors threaten to plug the faucets on account of the Bahati [Nazi] bill, it is no idle threat to Museveni.

Kadaga wrong on this, too: Donor money is critical to Uganda

Already, even before the bill has been debated on the floor of Parliament, the headlines are awash with the dire consequences for Uganda’s economy that the suspension of donor funds due to the massive theft of over $60m from the Office of the Prime Minister might wreak. Now, imagine if even more donors follow through and withdraw aid money on account of a morality bill designed to target about 500,000 of the country’s gay population. Kadaga will have to explain how that is in the interest of the 33,500,000 Ugandans the cuts to their aid will hit.

Ugandan newspaper headlines: Withdrawal of donor money will hurt Uganda – badly

There is also another, more sensitive, reason why Kadaga will eventually lose political capital if the bill passes. Already in her 50s, she is not married, and has no biological children. Uganda’s female population already outnumbers men and most of them are mothers of course. Even if it might seem attractive at this point, very few Ugandan mothers will look kindly at a female politician, who has never had a child of her own, passing legislation that might end up getting their children killed or jailed. In Luganda we have a saying that aptly describes the situation: ensi egula mirambo; ngowuwo si gwebasse (it is easy to be indifferent towards death – if no one you know is being killed). Mothers will bay for Kadaga’s ice-cold blood if, as should surely be the case, their gay children are rounded up and killed or jailed because of nothing other than their being gay.

Finally, Kadaga’s throwaway claim that the country wants the Bahati Bill is based on a fanciful premise and, oddly for a politician, an impolitic reading of the situation on the ground. Martin Ssempa, David Bahati, James Nsaba Buturo and their ilk want the bill – mostly because they stand to make hundreds of thousands of dollars from extreme right-wing (mostly American) religious organizations who are fighting in Africa the morality war they have already lost in the United States. All told, the Ugandans who stand to gain directly from the passing of the bill stands at around … a paltry 100 souls!

Uganda really can’t do without foreign Aid!

But Uganda is a country with 34million people and  they aren’t  interested in who is sleeping with who in the privacy of their homes. If they were, our neighbors know where we live and you would have seen mass lynchings of gay men and women all over the country. None of that is happening because Ugandans are quite simply not that kind of people.

Yes, you will hear how 95% of Ugandan are opposed to homosexuality but it is also safe to argue that this figure doesn’t take into account the majority of Ugandans who don’t understand what they are opining about or who give knee-jerk responses that they can’t explain 5 minutes later. No, Ugandans don’t care one way or the other if gays live in their midst and it is opportunistic pastors and some people from the pro-gay side who make a living perpetrating the falsehood, who have painted the clearly wrong picture that Uganda is homophobic. It isn’t.

So, a bill that only myopic politicians and cynical pastors want is being touted as the panacea for Uganda’s moral decadence and Kadaga has ill-advisedly signed on to the silliness which, if made law,  will never pass the basic litmus test of legality or enforceability. On the more pessimistic side, Kadaga’s die is already cast and she will now forever be seen as the Speaker who took sides in a scheme that sought to suck the life out of the Ugandan economy just to please a handful of bigoted pastors.

It’s not the kind of legacy she wants to run on in 2015-16 but … to quote again from Macbeth … she is now “stepped in so far that should [she] wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”

President Yoweri Museveni and his prime minister, Amama Mbabazi, have Rebecca Kadaga exactly where they want her; on the political ropes.

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