LGBTQ+ Nigerians recount police abuses under 'weaponised' law

Walking home from church, John Okafor said he was stopped by Nigerian police, beaten and forced to pay a bribe to avoid arrest for "looking gay".

Bloodied by a strike with the butt of a police gun to his mouth, Okafor, 24, said he pleaded with the officers to let him go, but was only freed after paying almost half of the 50,000 naira (R620) the officers demanded.

Lagos police did not respond to a request for comment on the incident, which Okafor said occurred on the evening of Sepember. 30 after he left choir rehearsal at his church in the Ojoto district of Nigeria's biggest city.

"I'm used to getting stares when I walk down my street, because I look and sometimes dress feminine," Okafor told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Being gay in Nigeria is a double-edged sword. Society hates you, and the police exploit that hate."

Okafor's ordeal is hardly an isolated incident, according to the Initiative for Equal Rights (TIERS), which advocates for marginalised communities in Nigeria.

Last year alone, it tracked 89 cases of extortion, 118 incidents of harassment and more than 20 unlawful detentions of LGBTQ+ people by law enforcement officials in Nigeria, according to programmes officer Fowosere Olayinka.

The number may be far higher, because most victims do not report police misconduct for fear it will make them targets again in a country that criminalises same-sex relationships, Olayinka said.

DECADE-OLD LAW

The Same-Sex Marriage Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) of 2014 includes prison sentences of up to 14 years for public displays of same-sex relationships and a ban on LGBTQ+ organisations. Rights defenders say the law has encouraged widespread homophobic abuse and intimidation.

"The SSMPA makes it even harder to seek justice. Queer people just have to stomach the mistreatment and injustice, because the duty bearers that we are supposed to report to will weaponise the law against us," Olayinka said.

A lack of civil-rights protections makes LGBTQ+ people vulnerable to human rights violations by some police officers, as well as members of the public, rights groups say.

Allegations of corruption against the Nigerian police force are rampant. A UN Office on Drugs and Crime survey from 2019 found that police officers account for more than a third of all bribes paid in Nigeria.

An official at the Police Public Complaints Committee (PPCC), which investigates allegations of police abuse, said few complainants file the formal petitions required to investigate.

"We've gotten a few of these complaints in the past about people claiming they were extorted from and harrassed by the police because they thought they were gay or dressed in a certain homosexual way," said Jude Adedeji of the PPCC.

He acknowledged that the risk of repercussions likely deterred victims.

"It's basically fear of stigmatisation or fear of getting outed in the course of the investigation," Adedeji said. "We do thorough investigations, and some Nigerians have attested to [abuses and] have gotten justice after they submitted their case to us."

People are at risk simply for behaving or dressing in a certain way that suggests they could be LGBTQ+, said Moses Peter, programmes coordinator at the Community Health Initiative for Youths in Nigeria, a rights group.

"LGBTQI individuals are often perceived as easy targets for extortion and harassment by the police, [and most] don't really know their rights and the contents of the SSMPA law, so these corrupt officers exploit that ignorance," Peter said. "I can't remember any month [when] we are not dealing with reports of police harassment and extortion in our organisation. It happens all the time."

The sums of money police allegedly solicit can have "severe financial consequences" on a disadvantaged minority that already is under economic pressure, Peter added.

PARTY RAIDS

In recent years, police have used the SSMPA to raid LGBTQ+ gatherings, claiming they are illegal same-sex weddings — a ploy described by Amnesty International as a "witch hunt".

Dominic Eche, a trans artisan who uses the pronoun they, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, they were arrested with a half-dozen or so friends at a birthday party in April in the city of Calabar in Cross River state.

Police were tipped off by a neighbour who had informed on a "homosexual party" at a friend's apartment, said Eche, 27. While the other detainees had family or friends secure their release by paying money, no one came for Eche on what they described as the worst day of their life.

"They were even more hostile to me when they forced me to open my bank app on my phone and discovered I didn't have half of the money they were demanding," Eche said.

But Eche knew their rights. The SSMPA stipulates a prison term for individuals caught in a same-sex act and requires evidence be proved in court, said Eche, who was released the following day with the help of a human rights lawyer.

For some, the only way out is leaving Nigeria. Rita Francis, 31, said she was stopped at a checkpoint in December 2023 in Port Harcourt after police spotted her wearing a rainbow-coloured bandana inside a car. Officers checked her phone and claimed to find compromising photographs, then threatened to publish the images, so she paid 70,000 naira (R870) to avoid arrest, said Francis, who is a lesbian.

An official at the complaint response unit of the Delta state police said there were no reports of this or other incidents targeting LGBTQ+ people for bribes.

"Paying that money, I think, was better than being arrested and charged for homosexual practices. The trauma would be [too] much for me to bear," Francis told the Thomson Reuters Foundation via text message.

Francis moved to Britain soon after the incident to live freely as a lesbian. Only recently has the sense of panic she would feel at seeing a police vehicle subsided, she said.