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After Kanye’s bizarre meeting with US President Donald Trump last week, he and Kim Kardashian met Ugandan president Yoweri Musevini overnight.
The couple, who are reportedly in the African nation for the rapper to make a music video, posed for photos with Musevini before giving out Yeezys to local children.
They’ve been criticised for cosying up to Musevini, who is accused of running a dictator-style government. He has been in power since 1986, and is known to have jailed his critics. One such critic, Bobi Wine said the West’s meeting was “immoral”.
“He is hobnobbing with a president who has been in power now for 32 years and restricts any freedom, a country where opposition activists are tortured and imprisoned,” Wine told The Guardian.
Musevini also has a deeply concerning record regarding LGBTQ rights.
In 2014, he supported an Anti-Homosexuality Act bill that would make homosexual acts illegal, and encouraged citizens to report homosexual behaviour to police. Disturbingly, the original bill called for the death penalty for those charged with homosexual acts.
The law was eventually invalidated, but LGBTQI people still face a high level of discrimination in Uganda.
The Ugandan government blocked social media websites during a recent election and has begun charging its users to access social media, making it the only country in the world to do so.
“Social-media use is definitely a luxury item… Internet use can be sometimes for educational purposes and research. This should not be taxed. However, using internet to access social media for chatting, recreation, malice, subversion, inciting murder, is definitely a luxury,” Musevini said recently.
Even Mausi Segun, the Africa director of Human Rights Watch, said Kim and Kanye’s warm, friendly public meeting with Musevini was a mistake.
“If Kanye and Kim would use their popularity and their access and the platform that they have to push for human rights, we would welcome that,” Segun told Time.
“The big issues are repression of activists and political opposition leaders. A lot of this has been really violent.”
