There is a Bill in the National Assembly by a member of that august chamber that wishes to create in Kenya a theocracy-by-the-backdoor. The Anti-homosexuality Bill, 2014, would punish homosexual acts by public stoning. Homosexuality in Kenya is debated in fits and starts. There seems to be no coherent policy regarding the subject as a human rights issue. Those who would seek to decriminalise it are or seem to be a committed lot. Those who would enhance the penalties, such as in the aforementioned Bill, are just as committed.
Anti-homosexual legislation in Africa came first courtesy of the Victorian mores held fast by the colonialists and settlers who made Africa their frontier in the late nineteenth century and now courtesy of the culture wars of US politics which the family-first types seem to be losing to the progressives and libertarians. But in Africa, where ideology went the way of the dodo once corruption became the true ideology, culture wars are a pretext for the myriad failings of governments, whether they be autocratic or democratic. The more the failings, the harsher the attentions of the State against the gays.
Which makes the anti-gay attention in Kenya curious. We are not Uganda or Nigeria. We may have an iniquitously corrupt system, and crime may be getting out of control, and the cost of living may be skyrocketing, but there doesn't seem to be an organised anti-gay lobby that would actually march on the streets in support of the stone-them-to-death Bill. I do not even see Canon Peter Karanja, Bishop Eliud Wabukala or John Cardinal Njue marching in support of the Bill. They will make pro forma anti-gay noises, but that will be the extent of their involvement in the whole matter.
This Republican Liberty Party is a strange animal. No one seems to know what it does and who its members are. And why "Republican Liberty"? Its stance on homosexuality would run counter to the "liberty" part of its name. It seems to have missed a few steps in the penalties' clause too. Why stoning to death? Why not chemical castration? Why not actual castration done by a trained medical professional? In a nation that has not hung a convict for thirty years, what makes the sponsor of this odious Bill confident that publicly stoning a homosexual to death will ever happen? Is this Bill a political stunt?
It seems to be. It is a joke. And the Speaker of the National Assembly is in on it. How else would he allow a Bill that actually spells out "stoning" as a penalty to get through his chambers on the way to the Floor of the National Assembly? More importantly, our problems are not on the order of magnitude of the problems in Nigeria or Uganda that the people would require an anti-gay law to hoodwink them. Ahmednasir Abdullahi's point that Parliament is Jubilee's worst enemy is almost certainly correct. This Bill comes on the heels of the County Governments (Amendment) Act, 2014, the Order of Precedence Bill, 2014 and the National Flags, Emblems and Names (Amendment) Bill, 2014. These pieces of legislation do little to solve our economic or security problems; they contribute a lot to the poisoned political environment and hate-filled discourse on and off social media.
The enacting of these laws is an indictment of the Jubilee administration's leadership, the hands-off approach to governing, their belief in their own hype. There are limits to how long one can fool all the people. It can be done some of the time; it cannot be sustained forever. Pretty soon, the discerning among us will start asking the uncomfortable questions. If the leading lights of the Jubilee administration wish to continue to be the leading lights of a Jubilee administration, they had best concentrate their minds on the real bread and butter issues that affect Kenyans and leave the mindless anti-gay business to the religious and cultural wingnuts.
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