Goodluck Jonathan claims David Cameron has a grudge against him because he refused to legalise homosexuality in Nigeria

Former President Goodluck Jonathan has explained the reason why the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron accused him of frustrating efforts to rescue Chibok girls in 2014.

In his recently published memoirs, For the Record, Cameron claimed that Jonathan stymied efforts to rescue some of the 276 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Chibok community of Borno State in 2014. Cameron accused Jonathan of preventing British forces from engaging in rescue efforts, saying he seemed to see the incident as cheap politics.

Responding in a statement on Saturday, Jonathan responded to the allegations by saying that, at the time, Cameron was enacting “unbearable pressure” on him after the president passed into law the same-sex marriage prohibition act. He claims that Cameron has been nursing grudges against him since he refused to legalise same sex marriage in Nigeria.

Under Cameron’s government, marriage equality was passed in Britain in 2013.

In Jonathan’s statement, he says: “I do, however, know that Mr. Cameron has long nursed deep grudges against me for reasons that have been published in various media.

“On July 24, 2013, while celebrating the passage of the United Kingdom’s Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, 2013, Mr. Cameron said, ‘I want to export gay marriage around the world.’ At that occasion, he boasted that he would send the team that successfully drafted and promoted the ill, to nations, like Nigeria, saying inter alia: ‘I’ve told the Bill team I’m now going to reassign them because, of course, all over the world people would have been watching this piece of legislation.’

“As President of Nigeria at that time, I came under almost unbearable pressure from the Cameron administration to pass legislation supporting LGBTQ Same Sex marriage in Nigeria. My conscience could not stomach that, because as President of Nigeria, I swore on the Bible to advance Nigeria’s interests, and not the interest of the United Kingdom or any foreign power.

“As such, on Monday, January 13, 2014, I signed the Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Bill into law after the Bill had been passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Nigeria’s parliament, in line with the wishes of the Nigerian people. This happened shortly after a study of 39 nations around the world by the U.S. Pew Research Center came up with a finding which indicated that 98 percent of Nigerians were opposed to the idea of Gay Marriage.

“Immediately after I took this patriotic action, my government came under almost unbearable pressure from Mr. Cameron, who reached me through envoys, and made subtle and not so subtle threats against me and my government.

The ex-president also said Cameron’s claim that he appointed generals based on political considerations is a lie, saying he appointed people based on their professional pedigree. Jonathan wondered how Cameron claimed he appointed his service chiefs politically when he had to sack them twice in five years to show how much he wanted them to defeat Boko Haram terrorists in the country.

He said, “He accused me of appointing Generals based on political considerations. How could that be when I fired my service chiefs twice in five years, to show that I would not tolerate anything less than meaningful progress in the war on terror.

“I was completely blind to ethnic or political considerations in my appointments. In civil and military matters, I appointed people that I had never even met prior to appointing them, based on their professional pedigree. Though I was from the South, most of my service chiefs came from the North.”

In June 2016, at a forum at the Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London, Goodluck Jonathan, in a speech he presented, acknowledged that there is need for equality in Nigeria saying that the “issue of sexual orientation is still evolving”.

He expressed the hope of Nigeria revisiting the same-sex marriage prohibition law as he said: “In the light of deepening debates for all Nigerians and other citizens of the world to be treated equally and without discrimination, and with the clear knowledge that the issue of sexual orientation is still evolving, the nation may at the appropriate time revisit the law.”

Interesting how he was able to say this in 2016, and in 2019, call the criminalization of equal rights that he signed into law a “patriotic action”.