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Gay law backlash: Careful what you wish for, you could get it

Saturday March 01 2014

The gloves are finally off, as the row about homosexuality in Uganda intensifies, sucks in an ever-growing number of participants and widens to cover issues that have nothing to do with gay sex as such.

The donor community have called President Yoweri Museveni’s bluff and began chopping aid, with the Norwegians reportedly leading the pack and, at the time of writing, others, including the Americans, the British and the Danes, said to be about to follow suit.

Millions of dollars funding all sorts of things all over the country are at stake. It reminds one of the saying, “Be careful what you wish for; it could happen.”

After he decided that he would assent to the anti-gay law that has brought him and Uganda under scrutiny, Museveni declared his readiness to “fight” its opponents. He dismissed his Western critics for daring to “tell an old man with a bald head how to run his home.”

For those threatening to cut aid to Uganda, he told them “good riddance” and reminded them that Uganda, currently financing over 70 per cent of its budget from internally generated revenue, is not that aid-dependent, anyway.

Well, he now has on his hands the very fight he was spoiling for as Ugandans from all walks of life cheered him through the few minutes he spent appending his signature to the controversial law and making some choice remarks about Westerners’ sexual proclivities, their disregard for politeness in seeking to impose their views and ways of seeing the world, and their obsession with sex.

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Besides the aid cuts, the decision has provoked tongue lashings from gays groups and sympathisers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu who has equated developments in Uganda to Nazism.

Meanwhile Scott deLisi, America’s envoy, has made it known that those who indulge in the persecution of minorities won’t be welcome to the United States. It is not clear whether the people Mr DeLisi has in mind are the parliamentarians who debated and passed the Bill; President Museveni, who has happily signed it into law; or ordinary Ugandans, among whom Museveni’s popularity ratings have shot through the roof.

Meanwhile, a blog on the website of the Economistmagazine suggested that, in assenting to the legislation and provoking controversy, Museveni was seeking to deflect attention from his “autocratic rule under which dissent is often violently stifled” as well as from “murky deals in Uganda’s fledgling oil industry.”

Actually, Museveni has no need to hide his autocratic side. Ugandans have lived with it for years and are sufficiently familiar with it, as are donors. When expediency has demanded it, donors have been content to disregard it.

As for so-called murky deals in the oil sector, these too are an old story that every Ugandan or donor who cares to already knows about. It therefore makes no sense to argue that suddenly Museveni wants to hide them from scrutiny, and that to do so he needs the cover of a law that will complicate Uganda’s relations with countries that, aid or no aid, remain important actors in international relations.

And just as one thought the discussion couldn’t get any more hyperbolic, someone came up with the idea, much hyped by international broadcasters, that the new law is a threat to access by gay people to health services, particularly HIV/Aids treatment. Employees of donor agencies have been keen to nail their masts to this particular argument.

There are some interesting assumptions behind it. One is that people who are HIV-positive are asked about their sexual orientation or practices when they turn up at health facilities and are required to respond to the questions. For that reason, should a gay person turn up, they will be refused treatment.

The other is that before President Museveni assented to the law, HIV positive homosexuals were turning up at health facilities and telling health workers about their sexual preferences, and that health workers who were willing to offer treatment then, will no longer be so willing.

How much homosexuals have been using health facilities is an empirical question that, in the absence of studies into the issue, one cannot answer.

As to whether they would freely reveal their sexual orientation, the fact that sex is not discussed as liberally in conservative African contexts as it is in the Western world and that gay sex is particularly frowned upon, allows one to speculate and say it is unlikely. It is therefore equally unlikely that anything will change.

Meanwhile the question of what will happen now that donors are cutting aid is one that merits some discussion.

President Museveni has made no secret of his indifference to whatever decision they make. Local critics of the use of aid as a political tool see a chance for Uganda to begin living within its own means. Is it all wishful thinking? We’ll know soon, won’t we?

Frederick Golooba-Mutebi is a Kampala- and Kigali-based researcher and writer on politics and public affairs. E-mail: [email protected]

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