Queer People Today, You Tomorrow

Every Nigerian is one state decision away from becoming ‘unworthy’ subjects. Yet many Nigerians celebrate when the state punishes queer people not realizing that what is being witnessed is the state testing and perfecting its technologies of removal. 

I grew up hearing my parents talk about ‘àwọn tí wọ́n kò ní rógà,’ referring to the arbitrary raids by the Nigerian police, who would drive up to random locations and fill their vans with ordinary people going about their day. They would proclaim these people arrested and their families must pay hefty bail to have them released, and worse off for those whose families do not realize they had been taken. Nigerian prisons are allegedly full of people who have been taken by rógà and are unable to get bail or cannot reach their families. In 2019, there was a disturbing gendered dimension to this phenomenon, when members of the Nigerian police force drove to a nightclub in Abuja, separated the men from the women, and arrested up to 70 women, calling them prostitutes and demanding sex for bail.

Beyond the oral narratives about rógà, another tradition you learn quickly as a young Nigerian person is: ‘You are guilty until proven innocent,’ or as my Yoruba grandmother would say, ‘Ọlọ́run ò ní jẹ́ kí a rógun ẹjọ́,’ ,meaning ‘May God keep us away from the affliction of legal cases.’ The Nigerian state is no respecter of persons or rights. This effect is visible in the negative relation between apparatuses of state power, like the Nigerian police, and the people, making statements like ‘the police is your friend’ almost laughable.

Nigeria has a history of consigning death on those who dare resist their relation to state power. Anti-colonial activist and suffragist, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, at 76 years old, was dragged by her hair by Nigerian soldiers and thrown out of the window of a two-story building in 1977 during a raid of Fela’s Kalakuta Republic, eventually dying from her injuries in 1978. Environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who spent his life decrying colonial oil multinationals like Shell, which still perpetuate environmental degradation in oil-rich Niger Delta States, was executed by the Sani Abacha-led military government in 1995. The #EndSARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) protests also ended anticlimactically on 20 October 2020, after Nigerian soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters at the Lekki Toll Gate in Lagos, a massacre which the army and the Nigerian presidency still deny to date, despite overwhelming evidence.

There is a persistent fear and anxiety to being Nigerian, as people would pray: ‘May Nigeria never happen to you.’ Yet there is a particular instrumentalization of these effects that we see, where the state summons people into an illusion, a provisional worthiness that depends on the devaluation of others. To be a worthy Nigerian citizen-subject is to point out others less worthy and to deliver them to the state to remove them so we might develop a nation of exceptionally worthy people.

Some of the most unworthy subjects with the most vitriol against them in recent years are queer people, poor people, and women (with the least worthy of all being someone who embodies an intersection of these identities). In March 2025, Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan was abruptly removed from the Nigerian Senate for reporting sexual harassment from the Senate President Godswill Akpabio. In late May 2025, a Nigerian Senator proposed to the Red Chamber that an indigenous community around the Abuja airport be removed because their existence was an ‘eyesore’ for him and not befitting of the nation’s capital. Similar sentiments have been echoed for the removal of queer people from our internet and our daily lives because their existence ‘corrupts’ our nation.

‘Remove them!’—what is the implication of removal in a deeply carceral state where justice is an almost unattainable phenomenon? I will invite my readers to look to their neighbours, the stories in the news, testimonies from victims of the Nigerian state, and the examples I have pointed to above to understand what ‘removal’ in the Nigerian sense means. It is Pride month, a month where queer people all over the world celebrate their visibility, dignity, and right to exist not only as private individuals with non-heteronormative identities but as public individuals who can take up space existing as their truly authentic selves.

We celebrate this month in Nigeria, too, mainly on platforms that have come to be safe spaces for fugitive communing and planning for queer Nigerians—the internet. While the internet has done a considerable lot for queer people in terms of creating a thriving community of queer people and other allied individuals, it is also fundamentally a geography of surveillance with significant layers of harm for queer Nigerians. People have been outed, kitoed, mobbed online, and had their existence debated on an almost daily basis. Queer Nigerians have especially emerged since the 1916 Nigerian criminal code as the socially agreed bodies for state punishment. However, what truths emerge when we read the queer condition in Nigeria as a national condition that separates people into worthy and unworthy lives? Who emerges as worthy (and what are the stakes) in the social formations and contracts that produce the figure(s) for state punishment?