The UK: Asserting rights and affirming status by minorities in our courts

Somewhere in England

A quietly deliberated and adjudicated event a few weeks ago requires some pertinent commentary, in which abused entitlement was found wanting by the assertiveness of the knowledge of right, privilege, history and the law.

After #Brexit, the government of the day went into an overdrive of assumptions of what they thought the referendum meant to the exclusion of the views of the almost divided nation that voted 52% to 48% in favour of leaving Europe.

Unravelling the Brexit conundrum

What ‘Taking Back Control’ meant was completely undefined, it was not a question in the referendum and if the government was not going to return to the people to determine the detail of what their desires for #Brexit were, one would have thought the final arbiter would be with the representatives of the people in the Parliament of Westminster.

Instead, the government was on a course of excluding the legislature out of the final determination and direction apart from the courtesy of a rubber stamping the decisions. This is where we are introduced to Gina Miller.

Standing up to convention

Gina Miller, born in British Guyana, long term resident of Great Britain, a successful investment management expert thought the government, the executive was going about #Brexit by excluding the legislature, by that the Parliament and so with other parties sought judicial clarification as to how to go about #Brexit and in the end won the case at the Supreme Court.

What Gina Miller did which was to assert the rights that any indigenous British-born person with generational lineage and knowledge of the Constitution, history and the law could have done. That it fell to someone else to do this is not particularly unfortunate, it had to be done and Gina Miller did it.

Then a lawless peer wrote

However, this opened Gina Miller to splenetic opprobrium, abuse, death threats and violations of her person and standing, chief amongst the purveyors of this abusive onslaught was a Rhodri Philipps, the 4^th Viscount St Davids whose aristocratic lineage stretches as far back as 1299. In him was the embodiment of entitlement and privilege along with a sense of aristocratic hubris that tempted him to consider himself above reproach and beyond sanction.

Railing against Gina Miller on Facebook, he placed a bounty with the words, “£5,000 for the first person to ‘accidentally’ run over this bloody troublesome first generation immigrant.” His tirade then descended into the utterly reprehensible by calling Gina Miller a “fucking boat jumper” and further questioned her status with this atrocity, “If this is what we should expect from immigrants, send them back to their stinking jungles.” [Guardian]

The law would not stand for it

This sickening onslaught did not stop with Gina Miller, he seemed to have garnered a penchant to not only be abusive but to suggestively inspire to violence anyone who could be enticed by his bounties to cause harm to others he did not like or agree with.

Whilst Arnold Sube had neither clout nor resource to fight back, Gina Miller was a different prospect. Having challenged the Establishment and the orthodoxy and won, she must have considered taking an uppity aristocrat and peer of the realm to the courts was a lesser challenge with a greater prospect of winning through.

Whilst we might forget that Rhodri Phillips was of mixed nationality parentage, his mother being a Chilean, I have concluded that hypocrisy is a coveted virtue of an entitled class without the ability to reflect before expression. For his show of stupidity, the 4^th Viscount St Davids was on the 13^th of July sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. Not long enough a deterrent in my view, but it is a humbling of an overbearingly offensive miscreant. [The Independent]

Know your status and know your rights

That minorities in the UK suffer so many forms of slight, abuse, threats, menace and attacks is not particularly news, I recently faced abuse on a train journey where the perpetrator pointedly questioned my status in the UK, not knowing that I was British-born despite my race. It landed him in court and I should soon be hearing the verdict.

It is not an issue of political correctness; some behaviours are just unacceptable today and must be vigorously prosecuted to the fullness of the law. At its core is the need to ensure that every law abiding person resident in the UK is not subject to unwarranted abuse in the first place and consequently be free from the threat of harm or the violation of their person.

In Gina Miller, we have found a reaffirmation of status and right, the right to pursue all legitimate means of redress in terms of constitutional law as a private citizen and the right regardless of presumed status to have the law deal sternly with anyone who threatens our safety out of malice, spite, racism or anything bad inspired notion of inciting violence against us.

In the aftermath of Grenfell Tower

From that fateful night in June,
And the days that followed that conflagration,
Nary a tower block that I see,
Fills with the angst of the souls therein,
For in the other was the struggle and fight,
Against the rigid and established order,
That bullied and threatened,
Those who spoke and wrote of foreboding disaster,
The indifference of officialdom was palpable,
As the double-barrelled named,
Could hardly be bothered,
At the shrieking of the poorer,
In a borough of the stupendously rich,
To wit, they sought to beautify,
The Babel of today,
They spent pounds and saved pennies,
With cladding that offered skin-deep beauty,
Low in the building on that night,
A fire started that should not have spread,
But like tinder, the cladding lit,
And a ladder it became for the fire to climb,
To the top, the flames did race,
In the building, the victims did panic,
Many in flat and stairwells trapped,
As they succumbed to fumes and smoke,
By the time we knew what had happened,
Over four score souls had perished,
The councillors with their tin ears,
Ignored the tragedy as they had ignored the residents,
She of whom was spoken of as strong and stable,
Lacked the paps for care and compassion,
Scurrying she raced from the heart of the matter,
As selfless neighbours showed great humanity,
In it, we saw the great divide,
That had become an unbridgeable cavern,
Between the have-nots and have yachts,
Our unequal society indicted and convicted,
Which makes me constantly wonder,
When I see a tower teeming with life,
Do they all sleep in there safe and sound?
Knowing that from disaster they can flee,
If an ugly day does come like in June,
Where many in the edifice of mock-beauty,
Were cruelly and atrociously cremated alive,
Because someone somewhere did not care,
About life and livelihood that brings no profit,
To their selfish political aims,
In my city, I see many a tower,
Stripped of the panels of superfluity,
Revealing the raw underbelly,
That might well save a life or two,
As we find in many tests conducted,
All around the land and abroad,
That the safety we took for granted,
Was a standing crematorium,
We must not rest on this matter,
Until the culpable and accessory,
That conspired in this murderous enterprise,
See the sternest face of the law,
Even after that is done,
It would never really be,
Justice for the victims of Grenfell Tower.

Remembering Fela (1938 - 1997) through our shared history of AIDS

Remembering Fela

When I heard that Fela Anikulapo Kuti had died on the 2^nd of August 1997, 20 years ago, I was very sad and I mourned him. He was the outlier, labelled the outcast who outed the potentates and powerful in their abuse of power and privilege.

His shrine was hardly a mile from Yaba College of Technology where I was a student from 1982 to 1985. There was an elite fraternity that invited him to perform on the grounds of the school and we the poor students had to find sneaky ways to view his performance from outside the barricades.

I suppose others will write about Fela’s life, his politics, his beliefs and ideology along with his activism, I would write here about a shared affliction.

Lesions and pain

On the day after Fela died, his brother, Professor Olikoye Ransome-Kuti announced that he had died from complications due to AIDS, further commentary suggests he had Kaposi's Sarcoma which is a form of cancer and the other parts of that commentary that indicated how he suffered might well prove that is what killed him.

On the 22^nd of September 2009, a little over 12 years later, I was admitted to hospital after a desperate visit to my doctor a few days before, when she saw the lesions on the soles of my feet and decided they looked serious, very serious indeed that she had to refer me twice.

What became lesions, started some months earlier as common Athlete’s foot until my self-medication attempts did not see it off before it began to seep pus and then became unbearably painful. Much as I was already aware that I was HIV positive, I was not on medication and to everyone around me but myself, my health was deteriorating and failing without me paying much heed.

Full-blown AIDS

When I did make it to hospital, and the first checks indicated the lesions were not related to diabetes, I was put on strong antibiotics which from my research suggested they were to attack fungating tumours, that was the first confirmation that I had fearfully thought was the case some weeks before, I had a cancer, but I did not know its name.

I will not be surprised if Fela also found himself in the same situation, in excruciating pain, the tell-tale lesions hidden from view, for usually, Kaposi’s Sarcoma can show on the face, in the mouth, or anywhere on the body, mine was on the soles of my feet, and so, it only made them quite painful to walk on.

After a few days, the antibiotics failed, I was running a temperature and some deep biopsies were ordered, 9 injections of lidocaine after, the pain was just as demanding of attention and reaction, I folded a piece of tissue paper into a thick mouth guard and bit on it as the doctor poked into the heart of the lesions.

The results came back a week later, I had Kaposi’s Sarcoma as a result of having succumbed to full-blown AIDS, I was dying.

Endure or die

My consultant came to chat to me and said, “We can treat this, it depends on how your body takes the treatment, if it takes, you’ll be fine, else you probably have five weeks to live.”

In a strange land, amongst people of a different tongue apart from friends and neighbours who became my support network, I had no closer relation to turn to as the gravity of my situation sank in. I was by then on antiretrovirals (ARVs) for almost a week when 5 days later I was put on a regimen of cytotoxic chemotherapy.

I was on chemotherapy for 5 months every three weeks, though, by December, all the lesions had gone, my HIV viral load was down to undetectable but the pain of cancer lingered for another two months after that.

Healthcare options and choices

I sometimes wonder if Fela ever had access to anything like the care I had, though a late diagnosis presenting AIDS, there was a lot that could be done for me once they determined what the cause was, what the lesions were and what treatment was effective against it. The cost of my treatment was also borne by insurance for there was no way I would have been able to afford the cost.

If I transposed this situation to the UK, my feeling is my doctor would have seen the lesions and adopted a wait and see attitude rather than act with urgency. I am not sure of what the options would have been in Nigeria.

Making known to the public that Fela had AIDS before he died might have sown panic in the populace apart from the stigma that comes with being HIV positive that still exists today.

Get checked, get treated

The antiretrovirals of 1997 might not have given much respite to Fela as he succumbed to AIDS, however, if anything can be learnt from Fela’s and my situation, it is the need for regular check-ups and on diagnosis, prompt intervention for treatment before things go seriously downhill from there.

Now, antiretrovirals are quite effective and are mostly free, they give people with HIV life expectancies similar to the uninfected, the advent of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis PrEP now reduces to a minimum the transmission of HIV for those without the virus, and studies now indicate that if your viral load is undetectable then the virus is un-transmissible. [Undetectable = Untransmittable]

In conclusion, as I remember Fela today from the perspective of our shared history, I ask that you get regular check-ups, get informed, get treatment and get on with your life. I got a second chance and I am here to share my story 8 years after AIDS and cancer.

Explainer between HIV and AIDS

AIDS is caused by HIV and it is a catch-all term for opportunistic infections that take hold when the immune system is completely compromised. A regime of antiretrovirals would give the body a fighting chance because HIV gets suppressed, the viral load goes down, the cells that can fight infection and disease gain ascendancy along with the drugs administered and you go from having full-blown AIDS to having HIV with an undetectable viral load and a chance to live again.

Another bother

Ever need to bother,
With tension nearing smother,
Before you say, O brother,
You’re are on to another,
In verse and rhyme, we pother,
Words weighed by the fother,
Seeking relevance in tother,
Breaking rules taught by mother,
Threading paths a whole nother,
As the plot goes souther,
I’m about to go further,
As I shriek with a wuther,
I seek comfort in the other,
With a visit from my fairy godmother.

Thought Picnic: To the gym for a Jim?

Sweet tooth dilemma

I cannot deny I have always had a sweet tooth, a characteristic of which has gone to war against my dentition from decades ago. Whilst I count myself more a tea-drinker than a coffee-quaffer, the beverages have required sweetening and milk.

Then I started changing elements of my diet out of concerns for my health at first and to address some fears of body dysmorphia that might accompany a certain age. I have thankfully never been fat, but I am a bit troubled about things getting out of control, like bundles of unexplained tissue at the back of the neck and a tummy ballooning into an embarrassment.

My medication can change the physiology that some people can be susceptible to lipodystrophy where fat deposits show up in parts of the body to cause discomfort and possible deformities.

Figures and numbers

Maybe if I spent a bit more time in the gym and took up swimming as I have always wanted to, I could bring that and the other under control. When I had cancer some 8 years ago, I lost a quarter of my body weight, having had a 32” waist for as long as I could remember, I was down to about 28” that my doctor in discussing the change to my physique wanted me to gain back all that I had lost and a little more.

I have never been comfortable to gaining back all of it, I would rather I was 10% to 15% short of my peak weight. Besides, I have too much of a head for the numbers in checking the Body Mass Index (BMI) or making metric comparisons between height and weight where I imagine you are fit if your weight in kilograms is less than 100 units taken from your height. So, the comparison for a typical height of 6 feet which is 183cm should carry a weight of 83kg or less.

I guess that thinking, especially for males, belies a predilection to physical attraction defined as slim, slender or skinny, which would put the weight at lower than 75kg. On matters of body dysmorphia, one can suddenly be quite fickle, for both oneself and others.

Changes to diet

On my diet, I started with taking the Maggi essence out of my cooking completely, I am good enough in the kitchen to make tasty food without enhancing it with additives. Though it is not what I would get from eating out. One radical change was when I stopped putting sugar in my tea and consequently stopped having it in my coffee too.

It was not an act of the will of determination, I just decided to try it and then concluded, it was doing me no harm. It has not knocked the kilograms off the scale, but I am a bit happier for it. My next activity has been reducing salt in my diet too. Along with this change, I rarely take fizzy drinks, drink more water and where I make yoghurt shakes, I use honey as the sweetener.

To the gym for a Jim?

I probably can shed a lot of weight by doing more exercise, my three months in Edinburgh involved walking to my office, sometimes up to 2 kilometres each way, even if I could get a bus. I thought it was good exercise.

However, the struggle remains to maintain a fitter body into my 50s without getting obsessed with the way I look. This blog shows I am a bit concerned, I just don’t want it to take over my life. That is my fear of body dysmorphic disorder.

Opinion: Why Donald Trump is no worthy example

What in a leader, I seek

With great difficulty but resignation to the reality, I have come to accept that Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. However, my respect for the office of a head of state may not necessarily translate to the respect for the occupier of that office.

When I see a leader, I want to be inspired, I want to be encouraged, I want to be challenged to see a greater and better side of humanity exemplified in the words, the acts and the activities of people who lead. Now, Donald Trump is successful and wealthy, he has clout and access to places I probably would never visit, but an achievement is no sign or embodiment of character or virtue.

I look up to people for what I can learn of their humanity, their compassion, their empathy and their ability to relate in sincerity to others, taking due consideration of others even to their own disadvantage because they see a greater purpose than themselves.

Not this man

I am afraid that Donald Trump does not embody virtue, character, goodness, favour or attribute that persuades me of example or conduct that deserves followership even though many do believe in his agenda.

One of the greatest exchanges in the interaction between people is respect, respect for the person, respect for their views, respect for their space, respect for who they are regardless of position or achievement.

I see people who have worked for Donald Trump from Sally Yates, James Comey and Reince Priebus who were unceremoniously sacked and vilified in their sacking. A complete lack of courtesy and reflection in calling Sally Yates unpatriotic because she respected the law rather than the person. James Comey was on official duty thousands of miles away when you saw on television that he had been sacked and Reince Priebus who probably learnt via a Tweet today that he had been replaced. [Apparently, Reince Priebus resigned privately yesterday.]

Recently, Donald Trump has taken to undermining and attacking his Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions, who happens to be the very first major politician to back his bid for the White House and has remained staunchly loyal to the President. He publicly stated that he was disappointed with his Attorney General.

The measure of a man

My view of Donald Trump is summarised in this quote from J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter The Goblet of Fire, “If you want to know what a man's like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” [GoodReads]

That is the measure of the man that Donald Trump is, a man unable to inspire and between his ego and himself, he conspires to exhibit the worst in manners, comportment or courtesy. That a man is rich and successful does not automatically confer class and decorum on the person. He, by terms, is caught in the personification of a Shakespearean insult, “Highly fed and lowly taught.” That in itself is almost a glowing compliment of Donald Trump.

Don’t stomach it

Personally, I think any person should know when to walk away from discourtesy, disrespect, humiliation, belittlement or indifference. It takes a great sense of self and self-esteem to walk away in the face of possible loss of status, means and opportunity, but if proximity to power saps you of free agency, independence and initiative, you have to decide whether it is worth keeping up appearances or giving respite to your sanity.

In my over 30-year career, I have worked with and for a broad spectrum of people, some amazing and others absolutely rotten. When I have had to walk, I have walked rather than suffer in silence. It is a tribute to my upbringing that I have been able to have the courage of my convictions even I am not always right, that is for my own conscience to deal with.

Revile bad example

My main concern with Donald Trump is how his behaviour sets no good examples and it can easily inspire the gullible, the malleable, the easily led and the mob to similar conduct. That bothers me more than anything else, when people are not respectful, when they are not considerate, when reasonableness gives way to the unreasonable and when being disagreeable is the default stance of communication, it does not augur well for the impressionable or anyone else, it brings an uncomfortable coarseness into our relationships.

We need to rescue ourselves from this crassness before it becomes second nature. I pray it never becomes common place. Maybe parents would start turning off the television in order not to subject their wards to the characteristics of the likes of Donald Trump. It can only be necessary for a better humanity.

The UK: 50 Years since it was Against The Law - Consensual Homosexuality

Sometime ago

50 years ago, today, Sexual Offences Act 1967 received royal assent, bringing into law the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between men in private, as long as they had attained the age of 21.

I was born at a time of interesting changes in society when the worst form of abuse you could throw at anyone was the phrase, “You’re a bugger.” It carried the weight of disdain, disgust, condemnation and disgrace, there was no particular understanding of homosexuality apart from misconceptions that fed the idea they were acting against the law of nature, they were evil, they were paedophiles and possibly worse.

Yet, it was rarely the case that to that point in time, people who found themselves to be bequeathed with the burden of homosexuality were inclined to be anything but normal law-abiding human beings. Only that the law through moralisation and sententiousness or just the need to find those to persecute criminalised the nature of people who happened to be different.

Against the law

13 years before this, Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning having been persecuted by the system for his sexuality, one of the pioneering brains of the computing age and to whom some of the successes to breaking the Nazi Germany encryption codes presaging the end of WWII is attributed. His profile saved him from jail, but it did not save him from the system that literally ruined him.

However, in all this, I celebrate three men, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers who were charged and convicted in 1954 for conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons" (or "buggery"), for which they went to jail.

Despite the sensationalism of what became known as the Montagu Trial, Lord Montagu admitted to being bisexual and Peter Wildeblood was first to publicly admit his homosexuality. The police were involved in a widespread clampdown on homosexuality even acting as agent provocateurs to entrap unsuspecting homosexuals for a prosecution that there were at least 1,000 men sent to prison yearly for being homosexual in the 1950s.

Against bad law

The way the prosecution and trial was conducted led to an inquiry which submitted the Wolfenden Report in 1967 suggesting consensual homosexual acts between adults be decriminalised. 14 out of 15 members of this inquiry agreed to this.

Peter Wildeblood wrote about the trial in his book, Against The Law: The Classic Account of a Homosexual in 1950s Britain, which was adapted for television and shown last night. [BBC Two]

Finding myself different

I began to realise my own same sex attraction from around the age of 7, just about the time that I had my first sexual encounter with a much older girl who was twice my age. I did not know or understand what happened between us, but I know I was taken into the toilet, told to pull down my shorts and instructed to put my thing in her thing.

How that impacted my sense of sexuality, I would never know, but in that singular event, I lost my innocence and became sexualised. In the following years up to the time I was 10, I suppose male servants seeking a sexual outlet found easy prey in me, to which I somewhat acquiesced, none the wiser about what it meant.

In fear and loathing

Through secondary boarding school, there was a fondle, some frottage and consequently lots of fellatio with one friend who assuredly was not homosexual. In fact, I met no homosexuals in any sense in school, or at least never knew of any until I saw some of my schoolmates in the UK.

By my late teens, I was in great conflict between understanding my sexuality and embracing spirituality, I could never square the situation of being naturally attracted to men and yet feeling condemned for what I did not choose as a matter of cause or course.

Meanwhile, I found amenable and willing partners for sexual expression into my twenties. On one occasion, we were caught in the act and literally blackmailed into complying with some norms. At the eve of my departure from Nigeria, one such liaison had revealed the tryst to another party and they both schemed to blackmail me, I refused to budge, told them to do their worst as I was also about to leave Nigeria.

The journey to accepting myself

By then, I had become aware that there were much more people like me, even if I did not know where to meet them. Back in the UK, I sought out men like me, I found a bar in the West-End called the Brief Encounter, now defunct, and from the moment I stepped into the bar, I began to the journey to the acceptance of who I was.

There were still many battles to fight for being homosexual in 1990, the police still found opportunity to harass, coming out had grave consequences for life and well-being, Justin Fashanu had just come out as gay and there was a great backlash, gays were being queer-bashed without finding any recourse or redress, discrimination was tolerated everywhere against homosexuals with homophobia expressed from politics to pulpit without sanction, we existed in an underclass of secrecy finding community in minority and the persecuted.

We were also in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I watched friends and acquaintances grab each day as it came, them wasting away until they expired. It was scary, then there was Section 28 enacted in 1988, which stated that a local authority "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality" or "promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship." That’s Russia today and worse.

We’ve come a long way

Within this period, I found companionship and love, great tolerance and understand at work where my managers protected me from abuse from colleagues and much else. Many never understood homosexuality but accepted we existed and respected us for who we were. Our sexuality and sexual preferences do not define us, we are first human beings and there is much to us than labels.

In the West, in 50 years, we have come a long way, equality is the norm, discrimination is condemned, expression is free, gay marriage is legal in many countries, we’ve had gay heads of government in Iceland and Belgium, and currently in Luxembourg, Ireland and Serbia, coming out is not such a big deal anymore.

The spectre of AIDS that strafed the gay community is not so much the sentence of death it was some 20 or 30 years ago, because of new treatments that limit the debilitating effects of HIV.

Many battles remain

Yet, there is much to do for gay minorities, to tackle sexuality and status stigma, to address homophobic laws gaining traction in other countries where gays are abused, persecuted, prosecuted and murdered, just for being who they are.

Many are caught in that morass of being against the law – of nature to some when that is what they naturally are. Homosexuality is not a mental disorder, it is part of our humanity and human nature, but the journey to accepting, tolerating and respecting our varied and diverse humanity is still a long one.

Today, I must celebrate that where I live, my homosexuality is not against the law.