President Obiang's Chutzpah

Equatorial Guinea's President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is a man who has been ruling his handful of mainland and island nation for 34 years with iron hand, after having executed his own uncle in a military putsch. And so it is not clear what moral authority he has to "advise" his fellow African leaders - dictators and non-dictators alike - not to countenance homosexuality because, in his self-righteous imagination, "Homosexuality is not God's will for His people and should not even be discussed in Africa, including Ghana. We simply believe that righteousness exalts a nation and not homosexuality" (See "Mahama Warned Over Homosexuality" Ghanaweb.com 6/15/13).

I don't even know why the Lord-Dictator of Malabo - the Equatorial Guinean capital - even thinks or, more appropriately, believes that God is of the masculine gender, rather than being of a composite gender or sexual identity profile and orientation. Else, why would Divine Providence, at least through the Christian Holy Scriptures in which both Mr. Obiang and yours truly evidently believe, declare that S/He created "humans," both male and female, in Her/His image, and not just the phallic component of humanity?

In essence, what I am clearly implying here is that the Equatorial Guinean premier does not understand the Holy Bible nearly well enough to presume to pontifically lecture his fellow African leaders on the contents of the same. Mr. Obiang also needs to publicly explain why a Divine Godhead that apparently countenances a doctrine of Trinitarian Homosexuality - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - would call for the summary destruction of the occurrence of the same principle of Judeo-Christian glory among the very human population that is supposed to epitomize the focus of Divine cynosure?

And here must be recalled, at least in passing, that Mr. Obiang is reported to have made his rather presumptuously pontifical remarks at a conference with journalists and other media operatives in Malabo. That his pronouncement is obviously a tactical diversion from the massive political corruption and socioeconomic and cultural hemorrhage wrought by his government against the under-one-million citizens and inhabitants of his tiny country is a gross understatement.

Needless to say, in the aforementioned country which has one of the highest rates of per-capita income on the African continent and its island polities, the single greatest bottleneck to socioeconomic, political and cultural development is President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo himself, and not homosexuality! For, indeed, during the 34 years that he has occupied the ultimate seat of governance in Equatorial Guinea, a heavily lopsided bulk of the wealth of his country has been deliberately concentrated in the hands of his own family members and closest associates, which is why it has taken the Lord-Dictator of Malabo this long to come up with a half-hearted and patently bogus development agenda called "Horizon 2020," which purportedly seeks to make Equatorial Guinea a virtual autarky or "a self-sufficient and growing economy."

Not very long ago, for instance, even some of the most prominent and revered African leaders and statesmen, including Messrs. Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, passionately appealed to UNESCO - the educational and cultural development arm of the United Nations Organization (UN) - not to accept a gift donation of several million dollars of his country's stolen wealth by Mr. Obiang for purposes that the latter himself did not seem to be palpably and vigorously promoting in his own country. And as was to be expected - you guessed right, dear reader! - this landmark cri-de-coeur from Africa's most eminent leaders fell on deaf ears.

Indeed, Mr. Obiang has an inalienable right to maintain any stance, he so chooses, against any section and/or class of African humanity whose culture or lifestyle clashes with his own. What he has no right to doing is to legislate and impose his capriciously individual perspective on the sexual orientation or lifestyle of any group of African humanity in the dubious name of Manifest Destiny.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
June 15, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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