Changing Attitude leads delegation lobbying against Nigerian venue for Commonwealth games

(Ed: See the Ugley Vicar blog for comment.)

A NIGERIAN BID to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Abuja should be rejected on the grounds of the country’s homophobic oppression of lesbian and gay Nigerians, a delegation told the chief executive of the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), Mike Hooper, on Friday. The CGF is due to make its decision in early November.

The delegation was led by Davis MacIyalla, founder and leader of Changing Attitude in Nigeria, who has been on a tour of the United States and the UK as part of the listening process recommended by the Windsor report. “Nigeria’s homophobic oppression is a violation of the Commonwealth Games ethos of equality, humanity, peace, unity, co-operation, and understanding,” Mr MacIyalla said. He expressed fears that Nigeria’s anti-gay Bill, which ran out of legislative time in the country’s parliament, would be revived.

Mr MacIyalla had done “a magnificent job in exposing the victimisation of gay people in Nigeria — a victimisation that is incited and endorsed by the Church of Nigeria and its leader, Archbishop Peter Akinola,” said Peter Tatchell of OutRage!, who was part of the delegation, with the Revd Stephen Coles, Vicar of St Thomas’s, Finsbury Park, in London, and Mike Hersee of Changing Attitude Nigeria, co-author with Mr MacIyalla of a report to the CGF, Abuja’s Bid — Sins of Omission. Read more

No comments will be posted without a full name and location, see the policy.