Before fundamentalist "Anglican" Archbishop Peter Akinola pontificates against gay rights in Nigeria again, I have some advice for him involving motes, planks and eyes from the good book. Namely the adage about removing the plank in one's own eye before criticising the motes in someone else's. Nigeria itself would be hard-pressed to describe itself as a moral exemplar in any regard. Certainly not democratic government, given that for large periods of its post-colonial history (1966-1979, 1983-1998), it has been governed by military dictatorship. Current Nigerian President Olusegun Obusengo is no stranger to power seized at the barrel of a gun, either, as he was Nigeria's military dictator himself as a general in the mid seventies (1976-1979). Yet, Archbishop Akinola apparently sees nothing wrong in collaborating with this former general to usher in a (stalled) same-sex marriage ban, which contains five year imprisonment penalties if one dares officiate, participate or attend a same-sex wedding, along with similar draconian penalties if one "promotes" homosexuality. Under Chapter 22, Article 214 of the Nigerian Penal Code, it is illegal for "men to have carnal knowledge of women or other men" against nature, which may lead to a fourteen year prison sentence. In Northern Nigeria, Islamic sharia law may mean the death of those caught in same-sex relationships may eventually occur. Lesbians and gay men alike are subject to public strip searches and imprisoned even if they only have LGBT media within their homes. Frankly, Archbishop Akinola would impress many more non-Nigerians and non-fundamentalists if he was willing to talk about the real moral stain that taints his country- the brutal repression of the Niger Delta's Ogoni people. In 1990, Ken Saro-Wiwa founded a nonviolent, Gandhian Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People. In that same year, Nigeria's Mobile Police Force massacred eighty Ogoni at a peaceful protest against Shell Oil at Umechem, and destroyed 495 homes. In 1993, they raided twenty seven villages, killed two thousand Ogoni and displaced 80,000 Ogoni. In 1995, the Nigerian authorities used massive bribery and corruption, and executed Saro-Wiwa on trumped up charges. With that grisly history, Archbishop Akinola's tunnel vision and selective morality becomes utterly grotesque. Why whinge about gay marriage when something indescribably horrific and genocidal has occurred in his country's recent history? Recommended: Rowland Macauley: "The Ostrich Position" Gay Times 338: November 2006: 58-59. Ike Okra: When Citizens Revolt: Nigerian Elites, Big Oil and the Ogoni Struggle for Self-Determination: Trenton: Africa World Press: 2007. Abdul Rasheed Na"Allah: Ogoni Agonies: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Crisis in Nigeria: Trenton: Africa World Press: 1998. Craig Young - 17th April 2007