What the Act says
The Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, usually called the SSMPA, does more than its name. It makes a same-sex marriage or civil union punishable by fourteen years in prison. It makes it a crime, punishable by ten years, to register, operate or take part in a gay club, society or organisation, or to support one. And it punishes, with ten years, a public show of a same-sex amorous relationship, directly or indirectly. Two men holding hands in Owerri can be charged under it. So can the friend who let them sleep on his floor.
It sits on top of older law. The Criminal Code that applies in the southern states, inherited from British colonial rule, punishes what it calls carnal knowledge against the order of nature with fourteen years. In the twelve northern states that apply Sharia penal codes, the maximum sentence for a man is death by stoning. No one has been executed under those provisions, but people have been sentenced to them.
What the law does in practice
Prosecutions under the SSMPA are rare. That is not mercy. The law's real work is done without a courtroom. It tells the police that a gay man is fair game: arrest him, search his phone, threaten him with the fourteen years, and take whatever he has. It tells blackmailers that their victim will never report them. It tells landlords, employers and hospitals that they can put someone out. And it tells families, in the language of the state, that the pastor was right.
The Act is not mainly enforced by judges. It is enforced by everyone who knows it exists.
When something was done to me in Owerri and I went to report it, I was the one who was threatened with arrest. That is the law working exactly as designed. The whole sequence, police station, lawyer, evidence that meant nothing, is in Owerri to London.
Who wrote it
The fourteen-year criminal-code provision is British, written in the colonial period and kept after independence. The 2014 Act is Nigerian, passed by our own National Assembly and signed by our own President, and it was popular. I say this because the excuse that homosexuality is a Western import is answered by the fact that the law against it is the actual Western import, and because I refuse to let my country off the hook for what it chose to add.
What you can do if you are in Nigeria
- Know that the police have no right to search your phone without cause; in practice they will, so keep nothing on it you cannot explain.
- Never go to a first meeting alone, and tell someone where you are. The safety guide has the rest.
- If you are arrested, say nothing beyond your name and ask for a lawyer. Organisations like The Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERs) in Lagos have helped people in exactly this situation.
- Call the support line. We have talked people through the night before.