Kenya: PM Orders Arrest of Gay Couples

By Eric Sande

NAIROBI---Kenya's Prime Minister Raila Odinga broke the silence on gay couple intervention in Kenya on sunday by reciprocally ordering the arrest of gay pairs in the country.

Mr Odinga stated, “If found the homosexuals should be arrested and taken to relevant authorities.”

The premier termed their behaviour as unnatural while speaking in a rally in the capital Nairobi on Sunday. Refererring to the recent census results that put the women’s population as higher than that of men, he said there was no need for same sex relationships.

He called the act of people of the same sex to go intimate as insanity whereas for a man to fall in love with another man while there were abundance of women in the country  and added that there was no need for women to engage in lesbianism "yet they can bear children".

Special programmes minister Esther Murugi attracted the wrath of Kenyans by calling for recognition and acceptance of gays in the recent past, a topic almost anathema in the conservative country of 40 million.

The statements from the premier are likely to rub Kenyan activists the wrong way, who have recently been emboldened to go public to campaign against widespread homophobia.

Homophobia is rife even in more tolerant African countries. South Africa, Chad and Gabon are the only Africa countries that do not expressly outlaw it.

In South Africa, the only African nation to recognize gay marriage, gangs carry out so-called "corrective" rapes on lesbians. A 19-year-old lesbian athlete was gang-raped, tortured and murdered in 2008.

Mr Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia who is project director of Political Research Associates — a Massachusetts-based progressive think-tank said, “It’s a political agenda being driven by so-called evangelism in the US and being pushed on to Africa.

About 40 nations on the continent outlaw same-sex relationships, with Uganda having been in the news earlier this year when it proposed death penalty for gays.