Opium of the masses.

Ideals, it seems, are more important than human life. If one goes by the arguments advanced in favour or against abortion or homosexual love in Africa in the past decade, one will be hardpressed to identify anything that sympathises with the plight of the living. Abortion is a hot potato that gets revisited every now and then, but with increasingly diminishing returns as more and more African women ignore their men and their faiths and instead, take matters into their hands. It is not surprising that a diminishing number of regimes even bother to enforce the portions of their repressive penal laws that criminalise abortions.

In recent months, though, the war of the morals seems to have shifted inexorably towards the men and women who wish to express more publicly their homosexual inclinations. Uganda and Nigeria have reacted with determination and zeal. The anti-homosexual bandwagon seems to be gathering passengers too; Kenya's Parliament has a growing population of cultural and sexual purists who are demanding stringent action against the forces of Sodom and Gomorrah. Some of the Kenyan worthies are demanding an audience with the Attorney-General, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Inspector-General of Police over what, the worthies hysterically claim, is a lackadaisical approach to the heinous homosexual agenda.

But a more nuanced view of the thing is warranted. Uganda and Nigeria, and indeed Kenya, have become very familiar with violence on a scale not witnessed in Africa since the dark days of military coups and civil wars. It is only recently that Africa's longest running civil war in the Sudan came to an end. But Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army and Nigeria's Boko Haram remind African governments that just because a government has made strides in one area or another that it will not face resistance for some of the things it has not made strides on. Museveni, Uganda's president, seems determined to rule until the day he keels over in office. Goodluck Jonathan seems to be presiding over a petro-fuelled kleptocracy that simply won't stop.Both presidents and their governments have singularly failed to establish institutions that enjoy the legitimacy of broad public support; instead, they are faced with open rebellion because their peoples have absolutely no faith that things will get better.

This, in part, explains why Uganda's and Nigeria's governments find it easy to identify an enemy everyone can rally behind: homosexuals. In Africa, where the scars of colonialism are still fresh in many minds, cultural colonialism has become the new frontier of pseudo-nationalism. Anyone that suggests that Africa is ripe for open homosexuality has not been paying attention to the facts on the ground. Ironically, the anti-homosexual agenda is manipulated from the same cultural enemies of the African peoples. The gay/anti-gay war is the an extension of the United States' Culture Wars. Where one lot won or lost in the US, they are determined to prevail in Africa. In Uganda they have found the perfect partner in Yoweri Museveni who uses "culture" and "tradition", "right" and "wrong" to cement his grip on power.

This blogger holds no brief for the gay lobby; far from it. But this blogger also realises that Kenya is unique, perhaps more so than the "exceptional" USA. In the decade of Mwai Kibaki's government, Kenyans demonstrated that "real" issues animated them: life, death, safety, security, famine, drought, unemployment, healthcare, education and the like. Until the proxy culture warriors brought up the subjects, Kenyans did not give two shits about homosexuals or abortion. Now, when hunger stalks northern Kenya, and corruption cartels threaten to derail Uhuru Kenyatta's agenda, while thousands of Kenyans are killed or maimed annually on our roads, and millions of man hours are lost annually in Nairobi's traffic jams, three Members of Parliament think that Kenya's senior-most public servants should spend their days worrying about how to roll back the homosexual agenda.

Life or death issues are no longer the concern of the rulers, it seems. Their principle worry is how to con the people out of ever larger sums and how to keep their ill-gotten loot  without attracting the wrath of the people. That is why they find it convenient to  distract the people with "wars" against gays and battles for the unborn, than in solving the problems of poverty, unemployment. rampant graft or run-away crime. In Kenya, corruption, and not religion, is the opium of the masses.