There have been bitter recriminations in the past weeks over two actions ascribed to Mrs Kemi Badenoch, the first black woman to emerge as the British Leader of Opposition, about Nigeria, the land of her descent: Her denigrating remarks in different forums about the country and the rebuff or cold shoulder with which she treated the olive branch extended to her after her historic victory.
The Leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party had drawn the ire of Nigerians, back home and in Diaspora, by identifying strongly with her Yoruba ascendancy and simultaneously expressing a sense of detachment from northern Nigeria, which she disparagingly referred to as a haven of Boko Haram and Islamism.
“Being Yoruba is my true identity and I refuse to be lumped with northern people of Nigeria, who ‘were our ethnic enemies,’ all in the name of being called a Nigerian… I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba],” she was quoted as saying.
She added: “I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram(enclave) where Islamism is.”
Reflecting on her heritage at another occasion, Mrs Badenoch also said: “Somebody once told me when I was very young that my surname was a name for people who were warriors. They protected the crown, and that’s what I see myself as doing. I am here(as UK party leader) to protect, and I will die protecting this country(UK) because I know what’s out there”.
Her needless diatribes against Nigeria actually began in 2022 while she was in the race to succeed former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. She had expressed disgust at the level of corruption being perpetrated by politicians in Nigeria and how their actions are impoverishing the citizens.
“I grew up in Nigeria,” she said, “and I saw first hand what happens when politicians are in it for themselves and when they use public money as their private piggy banks. I saw what socialism is for millions. I saw poverty and broken dreams. I came to Britain to make my way in a country where hardwork and honest endeavours can take you anywhere.”
In one of the interviews she had with the British media, Badenoch also said she did not want the UK to experience what made her flee Nigeria. “This is my country… I don’t want it to become like the place I ran away from. I want it to get better and better, not just for me but for the next generation.”
Born in London in 1980 as Olukemi Adegoke, Badenoch was one of three children of Nigerian parents. Her father worked as a physician or general practitioner, while her mother was a physiology professor. She grew up both in Nigeria and US, where her mother lectured.
She returned to UK in 1996 at the age of 16 because of the worsening political and economic developments in Nigeria. Back to UK, she lived with a friend of her mother, and studied for her A-levels at a college in south London while she worked in a McDonald’s restaurant.
After completing a degree in computer engineering at Sussex University, she worked in an information technology(IT) firm, while also studying for a second degree in law. She then moved into finance, becoming an associate director of private bank Coutts. She later worked as the digital director of influential Conservative-supporting magazine, The Spectator, a non-editorial role. In 2012, she got married to Hamish Badenoch, a Scottish and banker and they have three children.
At the Conservative Party conference this year, Badenoch contrasted the freedoms she is experiencing in the UK to her childhood in Lagos where was traumatized by the spate of robberies and burglaries that were pervasive in the city in the 1990s.
According to her, “there was fear everywhere” in Lagos. She gave a vivid description of the Lagos she experienced, recalling hearing “neighbours screaming as they were being burgled and beaten and wondering if your home will be next.” And during a tour of US, she described her home-country( Nigeria) as “a place where almost everything seemed broken.”
Her disparaging remarks about Nigeria have been generating a bitter backlash, with many Nigerians, including those in the Diaspora, condemning her standoffish attitude towards the land of her descent and the tirades she has been hurling at the country.
The CEO of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission(NiDCOM), Abike Dabiri-Erewa, rehashed Badenoch’s story recently when she squealed on her for rebuffing her office when she reached out to congratulate her shortly after her victory but received no response. Dabiri-Erewa, who was on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief, said Nigeria would not compel the British politician to embrace her Nigerian roots if she chooses not to.
“It depends on whether she embraces her Nigerian identity. We reached out to her once or twice, but there was no response. We don’t force anyone to acknowledge being Nigerian,” she explained.
The former lawmaker noted that NiDCOM has always been open to engaging Nigerians abroad who value their heritage. She cited the example of a former Miss Universe Nigeria, who connected with Nigeria only after facing challenges in South Africa. “She then identified with Nigeria, came to Nigeria, and we hosted her. If the Nigerian blood is in you, you’re always a Nigerian,” she added.
The NiDCOM chief further stated that the choice to identify with Nigeria ultimately rests with Badenoch, who must decide if she values her Nigerian heritage. “We are open to working with anyone who sees themselves as Nigerian, but it’s nothing we can force.”
Badenoch’s needless, quite unprovoked vitriols against Nigeria, as noted earlier, have expectedly elicited angry outbursts from Nigerians, home and abroad, especially considering her indiscretion towards Nigeria vis-a-vis the political pinnacle she has climbed. It is actually difficult to reconcile Badenoch’s current pejorative remarks about and contemptuous disposition towards Nigeria with her cranky, conciliatory overtures some 14 years ago when she needed Nigeria to win the political perks she is enjoying now. That was in 2010 when she sought the support of the Nigerian community in the United Kingdom in her bid to win a seat in the British parliament.
A campaign document, which has been making the rounds on social media, showed that during her campaign for Dulwich and West Norwood constituency, UK, she reached out to Nigerians while highlighting her roots. She particularly pledged to uplift the image of the country through her position in the British political system.
In a message to her Nigerian supporters, Badenoch had pleaded, almost genuflecting: “I need your help. I’m running for parliament in the 2010 UK general elections. The race is very tight. Last year, a survey was carried out in this constituency by the News of the World and the forecast was that I would win. This year, things are a lot tougher as the party has dropped nationally in the polls. I need your help.
“In a recent BBC interview, a caller insulted me because I’m Yoruba. I was very disappointed that a Nigerian woman who claimed to have lived in London for 45 years had issues with me being Yoruba than with my political views and shamefully made her comments on national radio.
“We really need to get out of this mindset where we are fighting one another and try and support each other instead. Regardless of party allegiance, a Nigerian in parliament winning purely on merit and not because of her relatives or by buying the election will be amazing.”
Lamenting that her generation had suffered enough from the mistakes of the past, she admonished that it was time to retell the story.
“So I am asking for your help now to support a Nigerian who is trying to improve our national image and do something great here,” she had pleaded 14 years ago. But her disposition changed after winning the election. This is why most of her critics lampooned her for exploiting her Nigerian roots for political gains only to turn around to denigrate the same country.
The hardest critique came from a former Minister of Culture and Tourism and later Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode, who launched an acidic and vitriolic attack against Badenoch, a potential British prime minister, for her disrespectful disposition towards her nativity. “Kemi sold her soul to the right wing of the British Tory party,” Fani-Kayode started his quite voluble verbal missiles against her, “and sought to put to shame the land of her forefathers, just to become their leader. Nothing can be more despicable than this.”
He continued: “The demonisation of our country should not be a pre-requisite for winning the leadership contest of a political party in a foreign land and if it is, one cannot expect any self-respecting Nigerian to applaud it. Her victory in the contest for the leadership of the UK’s Conservative Party does not in any way ameliorate my disgust of and repugnance for her or the foul stench that trails her wherever she goes.
“Kemi is a willing tool of the colonialists, neo-colonialists and imperialists and she is everything that any patriotic Nigerian and every Pan Africanist should despise. Unless and until she purges herself of her contempt, I shall continue to regard her in the same light as William Shakespeare’s character Brutus, whose treachery and betrayal was heart-wrenching and whose cut was “the deepest of all…
“To those from Yorubaland who say we must celebrate her despite her foibles because she is Yoruba, I ask the following: Must we support a Yoruba who hates her ancestry, heritage, values and culture and who sees and says nothing good about our history?
“Must we endorse the acts and words of an individual who has denied us before the world, who has nothing good to say about us and who has insulted and denigrated our forefathers? Surely, doing so would be the height of clannish and cultic behaviour and an inglorious display.”
Also, Vice-President Kashim Shettima, during the 10th Annual Migration Dialogue in Abuja last week, gave a measured, statesmanly reaction to Badenoch’s diatribes against the country, saying the Nigerian government is proud of Badenoch’s prodigious accomplishment “in spite of her efforts at denigrating her nation of origin.”
Shettima received an instant ovation on the occasion when he added for effect: “She is entitled to her own opinions; she even has every right to remove the ‘Kemi’ from her name but that does not preclude the fact that the greatest black nation on earth is the nation called Nigeria.”
The vice-president compared Badenoch’s approach to that of her predecessor, Rishi Sunak, the UK’s first prime minister of Indian heritage, as “a brilliant young man” who “never denigrated his nation of ancestry”.
A Badenoch’s unnamed spokesperson responded to Shettima’s comment, saying the British politician stood by her comments. She told reporters: “She(Badenoch) is the leader of the Opposition and she is proud of her leadership of the Opposition in this country. She tells the truth. She tells it like it is. She is not going to couch her words; and she stands by what she says.”
Ordinarily, Badenoch’s comments about Nigeria are in most parts unnecessarily querulous and rather rackish. Not matter the negative turns in her nativity, she ought to have been more circumspect about her pronouncements.
For one, she is too uncouth in her vituperations for the high political office she is occupying, which ordinarily demands the zenith of diplomatic finesse and etiquette, which include suave public speeches. After all, the elders say it is an unworthy child who points to his or her father’s house with the left hand.
Her divisive rhetoric about her Yoruba nativity vis-a-vis her derogatory profiling of northern Nigeria as a haven of ‘Boko Haram’ and ‘Islamism’ is at best infantile and asinine. It is not a crime to be proud of one’s ethnic roots, but it is impetuous and incautious to do so, disparaging another ethnic group in the same country.
In the first place, in spite of the challenges of insurgency and banditry ravaging northern Nigeria, that region is peopled with millions of respectable, good-natured and patriotic citizens who do not deserve that divisive scorn from Badenoch. Secondly, despite the atrocious campaign by egregious, irreverent insurgent elements to tar Islam in a bad brush, the religion, just like Christianity, remains a noble and peace-inducing faith being practised by billions of equally peace-loving and devout faithful all over the world, including northern Nigeria.
However, Badenoch might have been too blunt for comfort, but to ignore some aspects of her comments is to throw away the baby with the birth water. She, indeed, scored the bullseye on her tirades on insecurity and corruption in Nigeria.
Burglaries, which were common in Lagos and other parts of the country in the 1990s when she partly grew up, may have reduced today in the country because, as a security expert once rationalized it, most armed robbers of yore have tended to find a more profitable, less risky alternative in cybercrimes— ‘Yahoo Yahoo’, ‘Yahoo Plus’ and kidnapping; they have only been supplanted by insurgency, banditry and murderous activities of killer- Fulani herdsmen.
These goons have turned the nation’s various highways and inter-state travels into a punishing nightmare through kidnapping-for-ransom activities. History will be very harsh to the Buhari administration for, by error of omission or commission, adding banditry and Fulani’s murderous reign as well as heist to the problem of insurgency it inherited from the Jonathan administration.
Likewise, Nigerians will not forget in a hurry how the former administration’s inexplicably prevaricating, ostensibly complicit body language emboldened the AK 47-wielding daredevils’ unprecedented impunity to turn many parts of the nation into a sprawling killing field and take vast swathes of territories, terrorizing hapless communities. Thanks goodness that the military has been reinvigorated by the Tinubu administration to tackle and lessen the terrorists’ stranglehold on the nation.
What about corruption? It slithers with all boldness across the land, fouling the national air. The greed and avarice of successive political leaders in their primitive accumulations are sickening and almost unrivaled. This is what Badenoch described as the way Nigerian political leaders spend public money as if it is “their private piggy bank(s).”
The primitive plundering of the public till is incredulous, ludicrous and unconscionable. The story is told of a young man who was so poor that he was selling recharge cards for a living before his benefactor became Nigerian president. But according to reports, by the time the administration wound up, this young man, who was merely a private aide to his benefactor-president, allegedly had become a proud owner of a private jet and some trillions of naira in his account!
It was under the same administration that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC) recently secured the largest single forfeiture of 735 estate duplexes in Abuja. The anti-graft agency is still investigating the owner of the property but a government official, who is also answering questions over the alleged mismanagement of trillions under his watch, is suspected to own the duplexes. These are instances of just two people.
The Tinubu administration, in its own case, has, through the World Bank-induced policy missteps— impolitic fuel subsidy withdrawal and floating of the naira—worsted Nigerians’ misery, poverty and hunger, with an unprecedented inflationary trend, which shot the costs of living beyond the rooftops. The foundation of this was, of course, laid by the last administration, which virtually ran the economy aground.
The ‘Japa’ syndrome, a euphemism for Nigerians’ crave to relocate abroad to escape from the economic malaise at home, has continued to heighten with the worsening costs-of-living crisis. It has, in fact, become an exodus. Nigerians are selling all sellables to leave the country. Hundreds of thousands are dying in their dangerous adventures to cross through the seas and the desert to Europe and America by whatever means.
Thousands of others are now either sex slaves or victims of cheap labour in foreign lands. Many are falling victim of organ-harvesting cartels all over the place, having been hoodwinked with promises of good jobs abroad by human trafficking rings.
Hence, Badenoch’s diatribes are actually an underestimation of Nigeria’s insecurity maelstrom and economic quagmire. So, the best response to the British opposition leader and other Nigerians in Diaspora who have decided to give the country a wide berth is for the current government to concentrate on changing the present negative narrative.
It is a wake up call. It, of course, appears to be a tall order. But it is not altogether impossible. All it demands is a will and a serious approach by an intrepid leadership. Let inflation come down drastically. Let the astronomical costs of living follow suit. Let the political leadership at all levels make a covenant to rule with the fear of God, the larger interest of the people and for posterity.
Let the soothing wind of economic freshness rustle away the dry leaves of misery from the people. Let genuine smiles supplant the current tetchy grimaces on the faces on the streets. Then, only then will Badenoch and others be forced to change the current decibel of their negative songs about their nativity, Nigeria, into a rousing sonority.
A former diplomat and professor of Political Science and International Relations, Prof. Babafemi Adesina Badejo, in his own reaction on the issue, declares: “I agree with Mrs. Badenoch that Nigeria is a corrupt country as shown on a daily basis. Some would say that the UK is also corrupt. Fair enough. But there are fundamental differences. Corruption in the UK is not as widespread as it is in Nigeria. “Badenoch has rightly added corruption and its debilitating impact on Nigeria as part of her focus. Given the impact of corruption in Nigeria driving immigrants who would have loved to remain in Nigeria to the UK, I hope she does not drop this focus.
“Those who consider themselves more patriotic by criticising Kemi(Badenoch) for speaking basic truths should channel their energy into pressuring government at all levels to act responsibly. This will ensure that Kemi and others like her would have no reason to ‘denigrate’ Nigeria, sparing us the need to hang our heads in shame on the international stage.” We cannot agree more!
