Are Authoritarian Regimes Around The World Cracking Down on the LGBT Community?

Though the big three offenders – Nigeria, Russia, and Uganda - have much more bigger problems than gay people just living out their lives in peace, will their respective crackdown on the LGBT community make their respective countries better?

By: Ringo Bones

It seems a bit odd that given their economies had improved since the first decade of the 21^st Century that the governments of Nigeria and Uganda seems so suddenly decided to legislate draconian laws curbing the rights of their respective local LGBT – as in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender – community. Given that in Nigeria and Uganda, there are much bigger problems than gay people living out their lives in peace – as in the country’s Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist militant terror groups like Al Shabab and Boko Haram – not to mention Uganda’s Joseph Kony and his Lord Resistance Army which has since became the cause célèbre of the United Nations’ campaign against child soldiers, will these governments’ resort to persecuting gays ever solve their much intransigent problems? 

While Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently stated his case that the LGBT community in his country is an “affront to traditional Russian values”, his country is also plagued by Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist militant terror groups that is already entrenched in the Caucasus Region. President Putin posing shirtless for the press will probably not likely to suddenly grab a Soviet era PKM machine gun, hop on a Soviet era BMP armored personnel carrier to storm into the strongholds of Caucasus Islamist strafing them with machine gun fire like a Russian version of Rambo – instead legislates laws to give the LGBT community a really hard time to live out their lives in peace.

Though many international aid agencies are threatening to cut-off aid destined to Uganda and business firms with a strong LGBT customer base are suspending their plans – at the moment to invest in Nigeria, a recent documentary directed by Roger Ross Williams titled God Loves Uganda had shown that radical right-wing Evangelical Christian missionary groups are the primary reason why the anti LGBT sentiment throughout Africa is on the up rise. One could wonder if Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan is too much of a coward to tackle the Al Qaeda affiliated Islamist militant terror groups like Boko Haram and Al Shabab plaguing his country or of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni too cowardly to finally solve the problem of Joseph Kony and his Lord Resistance Army terrorizing the Ugandan countryside – or is persecuting their respective LGBT communities much politically expedient to do?