On the 10th of March, a video surfaced on social media, of two men confessing to the murder of another man in Nanka, Anambra State. The 28-year-old Angus Chukwuebuka Nwankwo had connected with the now-deceased man on Facebook. Messages were exchanged and the man told Angus Chukwuebuka he was gay and asked him if he wanted to meet up for sex? Angus Chukwuebuka agreed.
At first, the deceased asked Angus to come see him in Owerri where he lived but Angus Chukwuebuka refused and asked him to come to his place, in Nanka. So the man went to see him at his place. Prior to that, he agreed that he’ll give Angus Chukwuebuka 20,000 naira. As soon as he arrived, Angus asked for the money. The man told him he’ll give him the money later. In the video, Angus admitted he had already informed his friend, Chidi Omeyi of the visit. The plan was for him and his friend, Chidi, to take the money, rob the man and beat him up. However, the beating started since the money wasn’t forthcoming. They beat him and severely injured him.
He fought back but he was outnumbered. Eventually, he took out his sim card, put it in his mouth and crushed it to bits to destroy his contacts. He also smashed up his phone. This is the account Angus Chukwuebuka Nwankwo gave on video after he was arrested. He and Chidi, having overpowered their victim, took him to a secluded place and killed him. That is what he confessed after he was caught.
The story triggered an uproar amongst Nigeria’s LGBTQ+ community. #EndHomophobiaInNigeria began to trend as LGBT people, recognizing the all too familiar pattern of targeting and violence used the hashtag to document the violence they’ve had to face as a result of homophobia.
Fast-forward to the 16th of March, The Guardian Nigeria ran the headline, Man Kills Facebook Friend For ‘Sodomizing’ Him With N20,000.
In the piece, every last detail is distorted and twisted to make the murderers into the victims and the victim — the gay man who lost his life, into the aggressor. It reports that Angus Chukwuebuka “took his friend’s life because the deceased insisted on having sex with him.”
It basically took the story of a hate crime, the story of a gay man murdered in cold blood and made it into a case of murder in self-defence. In the account they published, Angus Chukwuebuka Nwankwo and Chidi Omeyi are brothers. Never mind that they don’t even share the same last name. They are brothers and Chidi, as the brother that he is, was ordinarily in the house to help defend his brother from the aggressor.
At risk of spreading their homophobic propaganda, consider this paragraph, which is supposedly Angus Chukwuebuka’s account: “We met on Facebook and he asked if I can engage in homosexual acts with him and I said no, but after much pressure, I succumbed. He promised to give me N20,000 if I agree to have sex with him. As soon as he came in, I asked for the money and he said he would give me the money after satisfying the sexual urge, which brought him all the way from Imo State. I insisted he must pay me the money he promised. That was how the fight started. He was the first to hit me with a stick and I fell down. My younger brother who was with me holding him down while I stood up and picked the stick and hit him and he died.”
Nothing in this paragraph makes sense in the context of the homophobic society we live in, and everything about it contradicts the accounts previously given on video. Not only did Angus Chukwuebuka himself give a more drawn out account of the fight, where he was the first to attack, but both he and his accomplice had injuries on their body from the fight.
It is a thing of disgrace that The Guardian would so shamelessly misinform their readers like this. This article exemplified just how much Nigeria’s mainstream media is willing to go for the perpetuation of homophobic violence, for the advancement of stigmatization. It showed just how blatantly irresponsible they are willing to be to make the narrative of queer Nigerians into one of aggression, not oppression. It is a very common pattern. The article was published days after the #EndHomophobiaInNigeria hashtag tapered off. And for many queer Nigerians, the reaction to this article was “disappointed but not surprised.”
The media, always, has been the key mouthpiece of the ruling class and the religious fundamentalists of this country, too willing to broadcast their homophobia without any scientific analysis. Their front pages are regularly adorned with headlines claiming people were convicted of homosexuality when the convicts were sentenced for child molestation. And when they’re not doing this, when they’re not reporting child sexual molestation and homosexuality as interchangeable things, they are writing up homophobic pieces on their own demerit.
In March 2018, The Punch decided to ask if homosexuality was natural. It did not reach out to the LGBTQ+ community or to scientists. It collated 10 homophobic responses and published them under the headline, Is Homosexuality The Function Of Nature or Choice?
That same month, The Sun ran a column titled, Theresa May, Hang Your Gay Gift in which one of their columnists had a complete meltdown over the UK Prime Minister urging other commonwealth countries to strike off their discriminatory laws. I do not think the utter vomit that is that article should be given light but here is a short paragraph from it to demonstrate how mind-numbing it was too even read: “But Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May opts to swim and sink in troubled waters. Gay rights is her pet project. No pretense. She flaunts it at the slightest opportunity. She arrogantly dresses it in all sorts of labels to make it attractive: Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender! She was so bold at last month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London. She threw it carelessly at the leaders of the countries of her former colonies.”
It wouldn’t be the first instance of such a reaction to international calls for decriminalization of homosexuality. In 2015, Lawal Ogienagbon wrote an article for The Nation titled “In Gay They Trust” where he lauds the United States’ shameless imperialism as an exercise in defence of democracy but then complains about the Obama administration’s support for decriminalization of homosexuality. Today, he is The Nation’s Managing Editor.
The Vanguard has been even more homophobic. Immediately after the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act(SSMPA) was signed into law, literally a week after, it published an article under the headline “How Homosexual Behaviour Promotes Disorders – Experts”.
The article failed to quote any expert or any scientific publication that supported its claim. It cited a CDC report that found that gay men had higher rates of new HIV infections and then a research paper by Robert S. Hogg et al. in the Journal of Epidemiology which found that because of HIV, gay men had 8 to 20 years less average life expectancy than men in general. This study was conducted in 1997 by the way and says more about how much the lack of healthcare access for at-risk communities impacts their quality of life than it says about the promotion of disorders.
Even before the SSMPA, The Vanguard regularly published articles so bereft of any journalistic or scientific analysis that its singular purpose could only be to stoke popular homophobic sentiments. Back in 2009, it published an article ‘What Will You Do If Your Homosexual Child Plans To Relocate?’ under which a cross-section of homophobes advocated for Violence against LGBTQ+ children, conversion therapy (which has been shown to cause severe physiological harm), and having the said child institutionalized.
In this country, the media simply represents the opinions of the ruling factions, which are all united in their use of homophobia to drive up popular support. During the 2019 election campaigns, both the APC and PDP accused each other of supporting LGBT rights to shore up homophobic bona fides, and the media irresponsibly helped them do this. On October 25th, 2018 articles in media outlets including The Nation, reported that Diverse, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Rights Movement in Nigeria, a group that ‘represents’ the LGBT community in Nigeria, had officially endorsed Atiku Abubakar’s campaign. They quoted Spinky Victor Lee, who was supposedly the community President Nigeria, West Africa. There was no Diverse. There was no Spinky Victor Lee. How they even came up with the story remains a mystery. The AFP also ran a fact check on the story and it was proven to be false. My guess would be party operatives trying to weaponize the dominant homophobic narrative, but that’s just a guess. For this homophobic narrative, there is no interrogation from the media, no asking oppressed communities to give their thoughts on the comments being made about them and no ethological analysis appended to these opinions. What we have is an institution which serves nothing but to uphold the cultural hegemony of the ruling class.
Cultural hegemony is the domination of a diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate our beliefs, traditional customs, religions, explanations, perceptions, values, and more to produce a society where their world view becomes the cultural norm. And they have done this with heteronormativity. Every day, they fan the embers of homophobia and the violence it visits on LGBTQ+ people. They recast and slant facts to craft LGBTQ+ people into aggressors, dangerous people, people from whom society needs protection. Queer Liberation activists are left swimming against a thick current of disinformation coming from reputable sources. We are left grabbling with the fear, mistrust and hatred that their reporting helps create. We are constantly inundated with language intended to be derogatory and esteem deflating.
Yes, Nigerian journalism as a whole is to a large extent inept but ineptitude at this point, can not be an excuse. It is a disgrace what these dishonest actors cause and how much they derail the public discourse with what passes for Journalism in their editorial rooms.
There must be a moment of reckoning among the rank and file of mainstream journalism. What is required is nothing short of a sea change in how they report LGBTQ+ stories, towards a proper representation of the facts and the lived experiences of people. We as a community must also remain vigilant and dedicated to deconstructing their institutionalized demonization of our identities. We must channel resources to building media outlets that are more representative, more factual, and committed to the advancement of human rights. Outlets which speak truth to power, and properly reflects the interests of all sections of the masses. For that is who the media owes their duty to.
Ani Kayode Somtochukwu is a short story writer and poet. His work has appeared in Tuck Magazine, Enkare Review, Gertrude and After the Pause. His flash fiction, “Dope Delivery” was a finalist for the Dublin Brilliant Flash Fiction Contest, and his poems were shortlisted for the 2017 Erbacce Poetry Prize. You can follow him on Twitter @kayode_ani
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this Op-Ed by the Writer are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Rustin Times.
