Anti-gay law: Why Uganda wants to become a pariah

Last week, a Uganda minister stormed a meeting that was discussing gay rights and broke it up. At the same time, a private member’s anti-gay Bill that had caused a storm over a year ago and seemed to have been buried, made its way back to parliament.

The anti-gay Bill, when it was first introduced, was so extreme that a parent who had a gay child risked life imprisonment, and some crimes by gay people would be punished by hanging.

News reports had it that Ugandan gay men had left and taken sanctuary in Kenya, making them among East Africa’s first sex refugees.
That there are anti-gay politicians and evangelical pastors in Uganda is not surprising. Indeed you find them in all of Africa.

The difference in Uganda is the anti-gay crusade has become an obsession, and politicians’ need for a dose of homophobia just keeps growing.

One explanation for this Ugandan homophobia is that it is political, Because State House is active in gay-hunting, and there have been concerns that there was a plan to use it to smear regime opponents as Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe does. However, that hasn’t happened.

The other is that because the regime has become so corrupt, it is gay bashing to assume a high ground and cleanse its image in the process.

The third is that Ugandan men are terrified by the rising independence, assertiveness, and cocky sexuality of the country’s women. Therefore, the gay phobia is an attempt to reassert their masculinity, and to put women back in the kitchen, mopping floors
I thought one of those options offered an answer, but not any more. I think the Uganda leadership, which happens to entertain notions of grandeur, needs a dramatic event — for example all of Al Shabaab’s leadership surrendering to the Uganda Amisom contingent in Mogadishu — to make it feel great.

A moon landing would also do it. This was evident a few weeks ago. Some clever kids at Makerere University “made” an electric car. President Yoweri Museveni was there to inaugurate and take a ride in the tiny thing.

However, there might be something else. Recently Museveni, once the regional president hottest on East African integration, surprised many when he suddenly backtracked, saying the EAC partners that don’t benefit economically from the Community should be compensated.

It will be noted that the anti-gay hysteria picked up big time just after Uganda discovered massive fields of oil in 2005. There is a lot of anxiety and a creeping craziness among sections of the political class and elite about sharing the oil spoils, and fear that greedy outsiders are already circling to steal the fortune.
The anti-gay Bill, and the possibility that sections of the international community have threatened cut off aid and other links when the first gay person is hanged, could offer the Kampala regime the kind of isolation it may be seeking.

That isolation would allow it to behave like the lion that kills a gazelle, drags it into the tall bush or up the tree, and eats it alone undisturbed by other beasts. Outside of that, nothing, even the “protection of African culture,” explains the extremely loony attitudes toward gay people that have enveloped Kampala.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive editor for Africa & Digital Media. E-mail: cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com. Twitter: @cobbo3