How Nigeria’s Anti-Gay Law Built a Blackmail Economy — and a Nation Cheered
Banners held up in protest after Nigeria passed its controversial Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act in 2014, which threatens LGBTQ+ Nigerians with 14 years in prison. Shaun Roy/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesYou can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
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You can simply scroll past — but please don’t overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
You can simply scroll past—but please don't overlook the importance of an independent queer press.
Time is now or never.
Queer voices disappear without independent journalism to amplify them.
We document what others won't touch.
We hold power to account when it threatens our communities.
This work exists only because you choose to fund it directly.
Donate over €25/month and receive our limited-edition tote bag — a badge of resistance, a statement that you stand for fearless journalism.
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The cake was chocolate, two tiers, somebody’s name piped in cursive across the top. About two hundred young Nigerians had gathered in a rented hall in Ekpan, a small town in oil-country Delta State, on the night of 28 August 2023. They wore white. A photographer was making rounds. Whatever else this was — and the police would soon have firm opinions — it looked, to the people inside, like a birthday party.
Officers from the Delta State Police Command arrived after midnight. By morning, sixty-seven people had been arrested on suspicion of attending a same-sex wedding. State spokesman Bright Edafe stood before the press and said that homosexuality ‘will never be tolerated’ in Nigeria. Several of those seized were walked past cameras during a live broadcast — faces uncovered, names spoken aloud. One person, caught on footage, kept repeating that there had been no wedding. Nobody was listening.
Six weeks on and seven hundred kilometres north, in Gombe — a predominantly Muslim state where sharia law operates alongside the federal criminal code — the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps raided another birthday gathering and hauled away seventy-six people on the same charges. A month passed. Twenty-three of them sat in detention. Lawyers working the case told Context, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s news service, that authorities were arranging to send detainees to a ‘rehabilitation centre’. The word ‘rehabilitation’ did a lot of work in that sentence. It meant conversion therapy.
Two parties, two regions, the same blunt choreography. It is worth being precise about what happened here, because precision is the first thing the spectacle destroys: in both cases, the authorities claimed to have interrupted a same-sex marriage ceremony; in both cases, those arrested insisted they were at a birthday party; in neither case has a conviction followed.
The Architecture of Permission
On 7 January 2014, President Goodluck Jonathan signed the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act. He did it quietly — no press conference, no announcement. A week went by before Nigerians learned what had become law. The Act didn’t merely ban same-sex unions; Nigerian criminal statutes had outlawed sodomy since the British colonial administration, and nobody had bothered repealing those either. What Jonathan’s legislation did was reach further. Section 4 criminalised anyone who registers, operates or participates in ‘gay clubs, societies and organisations’ — up to ten years. Section 5 imposed fourteen years for entering into a same-sex marriage or ‘civil union’, a term defined loosely enough to cover any form of cohabitation.
The National Assembly passed it unanimously. Not a single legislator dissented. Churches and mosques praised the law. A Pew survey conducted in 2023 found that 97 per cent of Nigerians opposed same-sex marriage. Two per cent were in favour. The remaining one per cent declined to answer, which, given the circumstances, may have been the bravest position of all.
But numbers like that obscure the thing the law actually accomplished. It did not so much prohibit behaviour — the behaviour was already prohibited — as grant licence. Human Rights Watch, in a detailed 2016 report, documented how the Act’s vague language (‘public show of same-sex amorous relationship’, a phrase elastic enough to mean almost anything) had become a tool for police extortion, arbitrary detention and public humiliation. And it handed power not only to the state but to anyone willing to use it: neighbours, landlords, employers, criminal gangs. Because once your identity is a crime, the person who knows about it owns you.
The Kito Economy
In the underground networks where queer Nigerians find one another, the word for this kind of trap is kito. Nobody agrees on where the word comes from. Everyone knows what it means.
A man sets up a profile on Grindr, or Romeo, or Tinder. He chats with a target for days, sometimes weeks. He suggests they meet. The target arrives at a flat. Inside, instead of one man, there are five or six, already filming. They beat him. They strip him. They empty his bank account — through a POS machine, sometimes, because these operations have grown that organised — and they tell him if he goes to the police, the footage goes to his family.
He doesn’t go to the police. He can’t. Going to the police means confessing.
A BBC Africa Eye investigation, broadcast in May 2023, spoke to twenty-one survivors. One of them, called Mohammed — a married father of three — had been talking online with a man named Jamal for weeks before agreeing to meet. He went to Jamal’s place. He started to undress for the shower. A group of men smashed in. They filmed him naked, begging. The video went online. His carefully constructed double life — married man, father, outwardly straight — came apart. He spoke to the BBC wearing a white hood and a mask. At one point, he said: ‘I was crying. I wanted to kill myself.’ Then he described a phone call from his son, who told him he loved his father, that being queer didn’t change that. Mohammed broke down mid-interview. He pulled off the hood, turned away and wept.
Another man, Emmanuel, was jumped by five men after arranging to meet a friend whose account had been hijacked. They forced him to hand over 500,000 naira — about a thousand US dollars — and burned him with a heated iron. He still carries the scar at the base of his thumb.
The scale of this is not anecdotal. In 2023, TIERs and twenty-two partner organisations documented 996 human rights violations against people who were or were perceived to be LGBTQ+ in Nigeria. Roughly 70 per cent were kito attacks. WHER, a women’s health non-profit, logged 1,871 victims between 2018 and 2022. In February 2022, a man was killed outright after being lured through social media. The actual numbers, lawyers say, are far worse. Victims who survive don’t report. The ones who die become rumours.
Spectacle as Policy
None of this is new. In 2018, fifty-seven men were arrested at a birthday party in Lagos and marched before television cameras. One was a hired dancer. The courts dismissed the case for lack of evidence. But by then his name and face had done the rounds on social media, and that is the part nobody can undo. Students expelled from university after an arrest have no mechanism to get back in once a court throws out the charges. Workers sacked after a viral video have no appeal. Families who see their son’s face in a news report captioned ‘homosexuality arrest’ don’t wait for a verdict.
Uyaiedu Ikpe-Etim knows this terrain. She is a filmmaker — her directorial début, Ìfé, released in 2020, was one of Nigeria’s first full lesbian-themed films, and the National Film and Video Censors Board threatened her with prison for making it — and she lives openly as a queer woman in a country that criminalises her existence. She told the BBC something that has stayed with me since I first heard it: that when a queer Nigerian is lynched, the reaction online is ‘almost celebratory’. ‘Oh great, good, they kill them. They should not be allowed to come out.’
Celebratory. That’s the word. It does more work than any statute.
In a country buckled by corruption, chronic power outages and an economy that leaves most of its young people scrambling, the policing of other people’s bedrooms is one of the few projects that commands near-universal enthusiasm. Nigeria’s two dominant faiths disagree on virtually everything except this. Politicians across every regional and ethnic fault line have learned that denouncing homosexuality is cost-free applause.
Small, Stubborn Refusals
Against all of this, there are people who refuse. Activist networks run online platforms — the Kito Diaries, JP Crime Fighter, Splendid Love — where survivors post attackers’ photos and dating-app messages as warnings. In at least one case, a group of friends whose companion had been kidnapped and robbed ran their own sting: they lured the attacker to a restaurant and had police waiting. A lone officer of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, speaking anonymously to the BBC, said he would take on any blackmail case regardless of the victim’s orientation: ‘Wherever they are, I want to tell them there is no hiding place for blackmailers in Nigeria.’
It is a fine line, and he is walking it largely alone. The structural problem remains untouched: getting victims to testify in court means asking them to declare, in a legal system that criminalises who they are, that they are who they are. Almost nobody does.
What Remains
In Ekpan, the sixty-seven arrested at the alleged wedding were released on bail — 500,000 naira each, roughly twelve times the average monthly wage. Trials were adjourned. In Gombe, eight men were sentenced to ten lashes for cross-dressing. Nobody has been convicted under the SSMPA for the original charge.
Nigeria is a place of ferocious creative energy — its music fills stadiums on four continents, its film industry outpaces Hollywood by volume, its programmers build start-ups from Lagos apartments with generators running in the corridor. And in this same country, a young person can lose everything — family, education, livelihood, life — because someone at a party took a photograph.
Mohammed, behind his white hood, said one last thing to the BBC before the interview ended. ‘I know they are still watching the video.’
The footage doesn’t expire. Neither does the law.
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