The leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, has said that despite being an oil-producing nation, Nigeria has failed to provide consistent electricity for its citizens.
Badenoch, who spent part of her childhood in Nigeria before relocating to the UK as a teenager for further education, said her experiences in the country significantly shaped her political outlook.
Speaking in an interview with The Spectator, she explained that growing up in Nigeria influenced her support for oil and gas exploration.
“My belief that we need to drill our oil and gas comes from growing up in a country… Nigeria is an oil-producing country, never had electricity,” she said.
“It is very easy to have resources under the ground, but stupid public policy means that you can’t use it.”
The Conservative leader compared some of the policies being pursued by Ed Miliband, the UK secretary of state for energy security and net zero, to those implemented under Nigeria’s military governments of the 1980s and 1990s.
“And I see quite a lot of what Ed Miliband is doing as being very much like what the Nigerian military dictatorships were doing in the 80s and 90s — ‘the government is going to take control, we know what’s best, we’re going to redistribute’. Stupid ideas which eventually just bankrupt the country,” she said.
Badenoch added that she does not want Britain to follow a path that could leave it resembling a developing nation such as Nigeria.
“Fundamentally, my views about how we should run our country come from growing up in a place that was very poor. You grow up in a third-world country and you look at why it is termed ‘third world,’ and I don’t want that to happen here,” she said.
She further argued that many people take Britain’s prosperity and historical achievements for granted, calling for renewed efforts to preserve and strengthen what she described as “British culture”.