It’s pretty good advice. The Westboro Baptist Church may be waving signs and screaming, but they don’t break into people’s houses at night and bludgeon them to death with a hammer like someone did to David Kato in Uganda. They don’t break the legs of their enemies and them burn their hands and faces as happened to Eric Ohena Lembembe, a gay activist in Cameroon. They don’t break into lesbians’ houses and gang rape and kill them in the middle of the night.

Africa is an awful place to be gay, but, just as everywhere else, gay folks exist and do the best they can under adverse circumstances.

Happily, President Museveni of Uganda has stated that he refuses to sign a “anti-homosexuality Bill” sent to him from the Ugandan Parliament. It’s possible that he would have supported had he sensed that signing the bill would have benefitted him domestically, as Nigerian President Goodluck Johnathan (who’s luck seems to be running out) did just this week.

Wasting no time at all, Nigerian authorities have arrested and tortured dozens of people suspected of being gay. The methods are frightening:

Human rights advocates in Nigeria are reporting that dozens of gay men have been arrested under a new law that makes homosexual clubs or associations illegal. That law also criminalizes same-sex marriage. Gay men who have been arrested have reportedly been tortured into giving up the names of others. Michelle Faul with the Associated Press has been writing about this and she joins us now from Lagos.

And Michelle, why don’t you give us more details, what you’ve learned about these arrests and the reports of torture from human rights groups there.

MICHELLE FAUL: As we’re speaking, Melissa, we’re getting more reports in of more people being arrested in about six of Nigeria’s 36 states. I’ve spoken with human rights activists here who say this has not just happened since the bill was signed into law, but since there’s been noise about the bill. So the very idea of the bill has led to this persecution of people because of their sexual differences.

BLOCK: And in particular the reports of torture, what have you heard about that?

FAUL: That particular report comes from Bauchi State in the north of Nigeria, where it’s almost a case of entrapment. A law enforcer pretending to be a gay man went to a meeting where an AIDS counselor was speaking to men, who have sex with men, about how they could do this safely. He pretended to be gay, got the names of a couple of people, arrested subsequently one person, used their cell phone – this is illegal in itself for him to go through this person cell phone, contact another gay person and another gay person. Called them for a meeting, arrest them, take them to the police station and beat them up repeatedly and brutally until they gave up 168 names of people who were supposed to be gay.

But back to Uganda. Museveni has a thin road to walk. If he comes out on the side of Uganda’s very active gay rights movement, he risks losing crucial domestic support. If he would have signed the bill, he risks losing international support at a fragile point in Uganda’s development.

He plays it carefully, but offers a few bizarre ideas:

The President said a homosexual is somebody who is abnormal because the normal person was created to be attracted to the opposite sex in order to procreate and perpetuate the human race. He said, nature goes wrong in a minority of cases.

While in the Bill passed by Parliament there is no provision for killing homosexuals; the President said, “The question at the core of the debate of homosexuality is; what do we do with an abnormal person? Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her? Or we do contain him/her?”

While the President said homosexuality is an abnormal condition that can be cured, he disagreed with the position of Western countries that homosexuality is an “alternative sexual orientation”. “You cannot call an abnormality an alternative orientation. It could be that the Western societies, on account of random breeding, have generated many abnormal people,” he said, adding that his acid test for rejecting Western position is that nature is purposeful.

The President said apart from the people who are abnormal, it seems there is a group of those that become homosexual for “mercenary reasons”—they get recruited on account of financial inducements. He said this is a group that can be rescued and that many of the youth fall in this category.

I’m not following his logic here. I seriously doubt Museveni does either. Though he says that homosexuality is a natural condition, he also tries to claim that young men become gay to make money. The former presents him with a problem. If homosexuality is to be considered an unfortunate genetic outcome, the state has no right to inflict punishment on the individual any more than on a person born with any other type of genetic defect.

The latter, I’ve heard before. NGOs allegedly come to Africa and recruit young men through promises of money and passports. There is no reason to discount the problem of prositution enabled by economic inequality. We’ve seen it elsewhere (a movie was even made about an Irish author’s disgusting sexual adventures in Nepal). Of course, the Ugandan and Nigerian Parliaments seem to be doing little to curb the much larger problem of female prostitution in Uganda and it’s difficult for me to understand how it’s at all relevant to the lives of people peacefully living their lives who happen to be gay.

And this is of course where the problem lies. Homosexuality makes for an easy target for Christian conservatives in Africa (often egged on by western missionaries and evangelicals). However, there is little outrage over extramarital affairs, child rape, and the buying and selling of women, an obviously greater social problem. But policy makers worldwide often like to pick on those who are unable to defend themselves.

How do the governments of Nigeria and Uganda have time for all this? In countries where half the population lives on a dollar a day, the problem of delivering food and health care would seem to be more pressing issues. Many people I know like to blame the West for all of Africa’s ills. Clearly, as these examples show, policy makers in Nigeria and Uganda aren’t in the least bit interested in the welfare of their people, preferring to weed out minor issues of “gays” than deal with important matters such as food, health and stability.

Sad.