Much Ado About Homosexuality And President Nana Addo’s Al Jazeera Interview

Once upon a time the question was put to me at an international conference of which I was representing students. This was in 1994, and the conference was in Europe. A student journalist came up to me and popped the gay question out of the blue, ‘what’s your stand on homosexuality in Africa?’ ‘Come again,’ I said, wondering if I heard correctly or she wasasking our knowledge of Homo sapiens.

You know what stereotypes are like! We grow up learning Europeans doubt our capacity of knowledge, don’t we? We used to call it racism until political correctness came along and named it patronising.‘I mean what’s your policy on gays and lesbians?’ she clarified.

Throughout that conference much had been discussed about funding higher education. It was the centrepiece of everything else, but I also remember workshops dedicated to concerns ofequality of gender access through the relationship of education and industry to students’ rights to car parking lots. Coming from Ghana, everything made sense except talk of rights to car parks bordered on the frivolous, very few students could boast or dream of a carin 1994. This was a time when most lecturers belonged to Kak-Dee club by default. They literally walked their way to lectures, or kind of hobnobbed with students for taxis and trotros the other way round.

For Ghanaian students, the immediate concernswere pretty much mundane in the 1990s. They were about bread and butter or,in perspective, about the almighty students’ loan; the adequacy or inadequacy of itand the timeliness of payments. It meant ‘perching’ for students who failed to get accommodation in the halls of residence on campuses and the inconveniences for those who could not find somebody to perch with. It also meant auditorium size classes and high lecturer-to-student ratios, and out-dated editions of referencebooks, single copies of new editions or no reference books at all in libraries for some courses.

Shortly before 1994, Ghanaian students were additionally caught up in the whirlwind of change that blew in from the collapse of the Berlin wall and the breakdown of the Soviet Union. In collaborative partnership with other democratic forces and opposition groups, students forced the hand of the quasi-militarygovernment then to change their rhetoric from ‘handover to whom’ to the actual exercise of constitutional and democratic governance from 1992. These were the real issues of our times, issues that any studentleader flying the flag of country and continent – officially or unofficially – would easilyrespond to without having to summon their wits.

In Africatoday thatsame whirlwind,as in the search for good governance,is still very much alive in Togo, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, DR Congo, Central African Republic, and South Sudan. The list is too long for this narrative! Equality before the law and freedoms of speech and assembly remain a tall order in these countries plus more. If there is anything else, it remains the stalled industrial development of Africa, unacceptable levels of poverty, abysmal road and rail infrastructure, near non-existent sewerage and drainage systems, falling standards in health caredelivery, zero access to clean drinking water and toilet facilities, and what have you.

While sexual orientationhas clearly emerged as the concerning human rights issue of the 21^st century the universal appeal of homosexuality and gay rights remain almostexclusively western. In continents like Africa, Asia and parts of the Americashomosexuality is contested, rightly or wrongly.Many of us still struggle to relate to the pros and cons of it for no fault of ours but for the backgrounds that have shaped our viewpoints and worldviews. I certainly struggled when that journalist put the question to me in Europe in 1994.

It was not only because I did not know what it meant to be homosexualin reality, I was also not familiarwith western constructs of it and attitudes associated with such constructs as I do now. My leeway was to stay appropriately factual about where we stood as country or continent – I was representing students across Africa after all. I admitted the issue had never found its way to the agenda of student platforms, but I did know unnatural carnal knowledge was criminal according to the penal codes of most African countries including homeland Ghana even if the law was hardly applied to the letter.

Probably due to our own peculiar pressing concerns much closer home, I could not imagine students prioritising the matter anytime soon. If they did, it would not be irresponsibleto be guided by existing laws and,more importantly,by public and cultural perception of it. Having said that, I was mindfully measured as well, knowing as I did, that the international student movement was underpinned by solidarity. I quickly added that students in Africaempathised with student organisations elsewhere for whom homosexuality or gay rights was of immediate concern, and all they asked for in return was same empathy, not judgement. Culture is dynamic, but evolutionary not revolutionary.

Fast forward to today and it brings in context the recent response of President Nana to the question of Aljazeera’s Jane Dutton about homosexuality in Ghana, a response currently stirring waves in the country divisively. I am not sure if the question was dumped on Nanaor it was part of advanced questions in interviews of this nature. If it was pre-planned, Nana should have negotiated its exclusion. It would have been the diplomatic thing to do, and it would have saved him and the country the controversyin which we are again caught in a causeless national debate.

Our primary attention at this concourseof our national development should be on growing the economy, creating and multiplying job opportunities for all. We should indeed be zeroing in on a national consensus on how to engineer wealth from our rich natural endowments and how to translate the wealth so generated into quality infrastructure and accessible social services. Our concern should be about crime and other related threats in the daily lives of our people, and our focus should remain targeted on human resource development through provision of quality and accessible education at all stages and the challenges of both. These are basic but daily aspirations of our peoples, hetero or homo.

But I guess the allure of selling the peaceful and democratic Ghana brand on Aljazeera would have been a much stronger pull factorfor the handlers of Nana than the alternative of refusing to be interviewed under international limelight about homosexuality as it were. I can relate to the drift of Nana in his response to Jane whatever the case might be. He was caught between the rock of an implacable domestic audienceand the hard place of international diplomacy.As a politician, his immediate thoughts would have obviously been how his answer would inure to votersat home in 2020. As a statesman and an international actor, attracting foreign investment would have crossed his mind almost simultaneously with equal appeal.

It was a tightrope and I would beg to differ from those who believe the President got the balance wrong in not being categorical about our stance as sovereign people with a culture incapable of accommodatinggayism. For those of us who watched the interview, we may agree he was equally diplomatic with naked truth when an unrelated question was put to him about Donald Trump. Very much like the question on homosexuality the old man treaded gently and cautiously,and emerged without ruffling feathers at Washington DC or giving away his own personal whims or what many Ghanaians would have wished he said or not said of the controversial US president.

You see, my good friend Boye-Kofi once told me of the story of Kojo who studied in Europe and returned home at the end of his studies. He was from a little conservative village anywhere imaginable in Ghana. At the end of his first evening bowl of fufu andgrasscutterlight soup he began to wax lyrical of his experiences abroad. The gathering of uncles, aunties, siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews provided a decent audience for the tales of this village explorer.

They tookin everything he said with open-mouthed admirationuntil hebegan to talk of how some women marry women in Europe and some men marry fellow men. That was it! He must have taken them for granted and for far too long. One uncle quipped, ‘so how do they do it at night?’ Kojo was still waffling an answer when the family head concluded their son needed the attention of the village witch doctor next morning. Everything he had said was crazy but the one about same sex marriage meant he had lost it completely.

Nana is not Kojo and he was certainly not addressing a family audience only. He was addressing a much broader and quite sophisticated gallery. And in matters like these, personal opinions are often immaterial, and it is not uncommon for less powerful countries such as ours to horse trade national correctness for a bandwagon with those powerful actors which call the shots internationally. There is no better way of achieving it than through strategically nuanced language. Nana must have known all that and needed no advice that the spotlight under which he sat at the Aljazeera interview was not one within hiscomfort zone of theFlagstaff House.

Let’s spare him the attention of the witch doctor and constructively construe his comments in international diplomacy where they belong. For the rest of us, let’sbe the building blocks that we are and get back to work lest we end up falling victim to a palpable ploy to divertour collective heed away from our national development goals.

The Writer Is Freelance International Relations Analyst And Political Commentator on African Affairs