Nigerian queer activists have achieved a High Court ruling declaring parts of the country's Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act unconstitutional. Yet registrars, banks, police, and landlords are refusing to honour the ruling, reducing it to a mere 'victory on paper'. Matthew K. Gichohi, Ayodele Sogunro, and Liv Tønnessen argue that queer rights are eroded through bureaucracy, not legislation
A court may open a door. But in Nigeria, few people can walk through it safely.
In 2014, Nigeria introduced the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA). While the Act is criminal legislation, it also targets the infrastructure of queer life: meetings, registration, support, and visibility. Human Rights Watch documented how the SSMPA has intensified extortion, arbitrary arrests, and service disruption. Public-health research found that queer people's fear of seeking healthcare rose after 2014, with measurable consequences for HIV prevention. The law's force lies less in prosecutions than in the fear it authorises and the institutions it teaches to refuse.
One queer activist described their NGO's workaround to us: 'We had to change objectives from LGBT to marginalised groups and add a bit on health when we had trouble registering [as an NGO]. A lawyer helped us.'
In 2022, a Federal High Court ruling in Lagos declared parts of the SSMPA unconstitutional. Yet activists and country guidance still describe registration and organisational life as restricted and risky. Registration means getting legally incorporated; the status that lets organisations bank, hire staff, and receive funding. Organisational life is what follows: meetings, advocacy, and reporting to donors. In interviews we conducted for the RightAct Project in late 2025, Nigerian queer activists kept returning to one phrase to describe the High Court ruling: a victory on paper. Registrars ignore it, banks override it, police bypass it, and landlords refuse to recognise it.
Cracking open one provision in court does not automatically reach the bank officer or the registrar. This wider view of queer lawfare in Africa, fought across legal, political, and administrative arenas, captures the texture of the struggle.
Queer lawfare is fought not only in courts but in offices, forms, and compliance checks that decide whether queer organisations can exist
The gap between a legal opening and its administrative uptake matters. The SSMPA lives on in forms, rental contracts, compliance checks, donor reports, and the daily caution of people who know the law can be turned against them. Queer lawfare is fought not only in courts. It is decided in the offices, forms, and compliance checks that determine whether queer organisations can exist.
The Nigerian state is a hydra. One head is the police. Another is the Corporate Affairs Commission. Other heads include courts, ministries, the National Human Rights Commission, landlords, banks, and clinics. Dealing with each requires a different strategy. A court case that helps in one arena exposes activists in another. A name that works for a health donor is dangerous on a registration form.
This makes visibility a politics, not a principle, and its risks are not shared equally. For some activists, coded language like 'key populations' feels like erasure; for others, it is survival. Class, geography, religion, age, gender identity, and organisational position shape who can speak openly and who must stay coded. Position here means an organisation´s standing in the movement – its funding, reach, and influence. Well-resourced organisations can risk visibility; smaller ones cannot. Visibility may be safer in parts of Lagos or Abuja than in northern states operating under Sharia law. Within movement spaces historically shaped by HIV and organised around men who have sex with men (MSM), lesbian, bisexual, trans, and intersex concerns are still pushed to the margins.
Queer lawfare is not only about whether 'the movement' wins or loses, but about which constituencies can access protection, funding and services
Queer lawfare is therefore also the politics of the distribution of risk: who gets to be bold, and who absorbs the backlash. If we view it through an administrative lens, we can see that lawfare is not only about whether 'the movement' wins or loses, but about which queer constituencies can access protection, funding, documents, services, and safety.
Nigeria is not an exception. Recent legal and administrative moves in Ghana, Uganda, and Senegal do not merely punish intimacy. They extend legal control over advocacy, support, financing, communication, and organisational life. Repression travels through administrative institutions before it reaches a courtroom. A law that criminalises 'promotion' of LGBTIQ issues causes distress to an editor, a donor, a teacher, a landlord. A law that asks neighbours to report on what they see turns family and employers into extensions of state power.
The same lens reshapes how we read recognition. Botswana's decriminalisation, Namibia's recognition of foreign same-sex marriages, and Kenya's emerging jurisprudence on gender markers are real victories. Their meaning depends on what happens next: whether registries comply, whether immigration officials honour family ties, whether banks and clinics treat recognition as real. Kenya is striking because the fight is explicitly administrative – about documents that reduce humiliation and exclusion. The bureaucratic terrain can discipline, but it can also liberate.
Rights need organisations that can monitor implementation, pay lawyers, run shelters, document violations, and respond when people are arrested or evicted. When funding collapses, rights thin out. Nigerian activists describe stop-work orders, project closures, salary cuts, and the loss of international cover that once made repression more costly. Without that infrastructure, a right may exist in legal language while disappearing in the very places where people need it most: the clinic, the shelter, the police station, the registry, the bank.
Without an infrastructure to monitor implementation, pay lawyers or run shelters, a right may exist in legal language while disappearing in the very places where people need it most
For readers in the Global North, this should unsettle any easy geography of progress and backlash. The legal regulation of queer life in Africa is entangled with colonial legal inheritances, transnational religious organising, donor regimes, HIV funding, and migration politics. European institutions are not outside this story. They are inside it.
A movement can win in court and lose at the registry. It can secure a judgment and still lose an office, an account, a clinic, or a safe meeting space. That is what a victory on paper teaches us. Rights do not become real at the moment of judgment. They become real when people can use them safely and repeatedly in the ordinary places where life is organised.
