Life for a gay person is that of constant denial, rejection and fear. I am afraid of what people think, you are afraid of people who might attack or blackmail you, you are afraid of the hate the pastor preaches on Sunday and you are afraid of what the government would do to you.

I constantly live in fear of isolation, violence and the rejection of friends if they find out you are gay.

Lots of gay people in Nigeria survive by living doubles lives; they try to cover up their sexuality all the time and they force themselves to fit in because they want to be able to reach their potential in life and a lot of them even start up families just to fit into what the society calls normal.

If you are gay in Nigeria and you are known, you can never be right, people will use your sexuality as a basis to judge everything you do and their judgement would always be that you are a failure.

Gay people are already going through a lot because of how they are perceived in Nigeria and what this law does is to make their unfair treatment legal.

Now people would see it as their right to freely deal with gay people, the police could begin to arrest people arbitrarily and they would start making up claims so as to extort gay people and further deal with them. Blackmail could be on the rise, HIV transmission could also be on the rise and people, who are already living with the virus won't have access to medication anymore, if they had earlier identified themselves as being gay.

The catastrophe this law is going to cause is something that I can't explain with words, it would be the biggest challenge and blow to an already suffering minority.

I think civil society can pressure the government to repeal this law as it is highly uncalled for and sets Nigeria several steps backward in development around the world. Civil society organizations have got to challenge the government legally on the constitutionality of this law as organizations should have the right to provide life-saving services and information to every citizen, including LGBT individuals.

Organizations should also spread out their arms and reach out to the LGBT people at this time and help them stay strong and also support them in diverse ways. 

I hope that people's minds would change one day and they would learn to accept LGBT people as one of them and I also hope that the Nigerian government would repeal this law urgently. I have another hope and that is that humans would one day realize that Love is all that matters.