By Melanie Nathan October 095, 2025
Outrage at the Mamdani Kadaga Connection: How Silence on Uganda’s Anti-LGBT Law Undercuts ‘Stand With the Marginalized’
Zohran Mamdani says he stands with the marginalized, yet stayed silent on Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill —and then posed with its chief champion, Rebecca Kadaga. That’s not allyship. It looks like complicity. Back on August 02, I wrote: “The political values he champions in the United States—equity, humility, and solidarity with the marginalized—stand in stark and unsettling contrast to his actions on African soil. The disconnect between his public persona and private behavior is not just troubling—it’s politically and ethically disqualifying…”
Zohran Mamdani, New York State Assembly member, is a self‑described democratic socialist who is running to become New York City’s mayor on a platform built around housing justice, public service expansion, and economic democracy. His agenda, known as “Zohranomics,” seeks to freeze rents, expand affordable housing, eliminate fares on city buses, introduce universal childcare, and establish city‑owned grocery stores—funded through higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, along with municipal bonds and redirected subsidies.
However mere months after winning the New York Mayoral Democratic Party primary vote, Mamdani set off on an odyssey to the land of his birth, Uganda, where his actions overtly do not match the principles he so loudly espoused for his U.S. campaign.
Now several months after I reported on this here, The New York Post has uncovered photographs which lend credence to my concerns and evidences a willingness to sidestep moral clarity when it challenges his image—whether in matters of elitism, human rights, or even antisemitism, yet another issue of grave concern.
According to the New York Post:
Mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani flashed a beaming smile in a cringeworthy photo with a top Ugandan official [ SPEAKER OF PARLIAMENT at the time the Kill the Gays Bill was first passed in 2014.] who pushed harsh anti-LGBT policies — that included life imprisonment for gay people. [ And by the way, it includes the DEATH PENALTY for so called “Aggravated homosexuality.”
Mamdani met with Rebecca Kadaga in July during a break from the campaign trail — after winning the Democratic primary — that included a lavish celebration of his recent nuptials at a seculuded Ugandan compound owned by his family.
Then Speaker Kadaga gushed in photos with Mamdani smiling:
“Delighted to meet with Zohran Mamdhani (sic), incoming Mayor of New York City. Good luck in the next phase of elections,”
Kadaga gushed in another photo of her:
“Here with Zohran Mamdhani and Prof Mamdhani as Zohran returns to New York after his traditional wedding in Kampala,” Mamdani and his father, Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani.
Mamdani smiles beside the chief promoter of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law—and still has not condemned it: By appearing, smiling, and “cosying up” with Rebecca Kadaga—the most visible champion of Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” legislation—and by failing to condemn that law, Zohran Mamdani projects complicity with lethal homophobia. As shown in the social-media post, 86,800 people now see an image that reads as alignment. When someone claims to defend the marginalized yet refuses to repudiate a law that threatens LGBTQI+ people with death, the message is unmistakable: solidarity is performative; the smiles signal consent.
Mamdani’s smiles alongside Rebecca Kadaga aren’t a neutral photo-op; paired with his refusal to condemn Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” law, they read as complicity. This is much more than a missed opportunity! That image lands especially hard in New York City, where many Ugandan asylum seekers are rebuilding their lives after Ugandan state-licensed violence—assaults, torture, and community terror unleashed under the banner of that law. How should they trust a man who may soon be NYC’s mayor when he will not publicly repudiate legislation that put their lives at risk? Silence here is not diplomacy; it is a message about whose safety is negotiable.
In my country-conditions work as an expert witness for Ugandan asylum seekers, I document a grim political symbiosis in which both Muslim and Christian extremists scapegoat LGBTQI+ people and pursue power by promising—and passing—punitive laws. Against that backdrop, a New York leader’s refusal to draw a bright line is not a minor lapse. It signals indifference to the very people forced to flee religious and societal extremism—and it raises serious doubts about how he would lead and protect those communities here.
This raises the question – is he protecting the Ugandan community of lawmakers who have robbed people of their basic human rights? If he is capable of that, perhaps he is displaying proclivity to “protect his own” at the expense of others who he is charged with protecting. Will this apply to the Jews of New York City too? Where he refuses to condemn the phrase :”globalize the intifada”, in the context of these times, a call to violence against Jews?
If Mamdani tries to worm his way out by trying to assert he knew nothing of Kadaga’s involvement in the law, it would be a lie…. or if true it proves he is unqualified for the job of Mayor of a city such as New York. Not only was her involvement huge news for over a decades, Uganda is a small place where people from the country know very well that the 2014 AHA Anti-Homosexuality Act was led to the finish line by Kadaga. She spoke vehemently against LGBT people in many public instances, including global Parliamentary meetings. Kadaga’s gay hate rhetoric rhetoric and parlance is well known, worldwide. Also Mamdani would be aware that 98% of Uganda’s Parliament is for the Bill that passed unanimously.
If he pleas ignorance, I would be willing to inform Mr. Mamdani on the harms experienced by Uganda’s LGBTI community, which he fails to address, even as many seek protection in New York City. From assaults, sexual torture, so called corrective rape, to vigilante and mob justice, arbitrary arrest, lengthy unlawful detentions, banishment, blackmail, disappearances, forced anal exams, conversion therapy, denial of basic services, torture, and starvation, in deplorable prison conditions, … and killings…. this list is exhaustive.
Rebecca Kadaga, of the National Resistance Movement (NRM), is a Member of Uganda’s Parliament representing Kamuli District and serves in Cabinet as First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for East African Community Affairs.The harm in supporting Kadaga is extensive. She is closely aligned with President Yoweri Museveni—Uganda’s long-time ruler—who, upon signing the “Kill the Gays” law, urged African leaders to “save the world from homosexuality.” That agenda has helped fuel a regional cascade of harsher anti-LGBTQI+ measures—in countries already criminalizing same-sex relations, such as Ghana, and by spurring new legislation in places like Burkina Faso.
If Mamdani rejects Kadaga’s genocidal persuasions and involvement, he must say so—clearly and publicly. Until he does, the photograph, the smiles, and his silence together communicate complicity with a law that puts LGBTQI+ lives at risk. He should also apologize to asylum seekers and refugees in NYC and the USA, who by the hundreds have fled this horror!
READ MORE ABOUT REBECCA KADAGA ‘S RECORD HERE.
By Melanie Nathan
Country Conditions Expert Witness for LGBTQI+ People from 20 African countries
Commissionermnathan@gmail.com
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