The MP Kemi Badenoch, aka Kemi Bad Enough and Kemi Bad Enoch (which plays on Enoch Powell, the anti-immigration Tory politician of the 1960s infamous for his “Rivers of Blood” speech), a possible aspirant for the leadership of the Tory Party reeling from electoral massacre, claimed in Parliament today: I mostly grew up in Nigeria, under a socialist military Government.
This story was patently untrue and deployed ostensibly to give “socialists” a bad name by linking them to a criminal military regime in Nigeria, and by extension implying that the newly-elected Labour government would be tainted by association with the “socialist” military government that Badenoch grew up under.
For starters, there is nothing “socialist” about Labour under prime minister Keir Starmer and most certainly nothing “socialist” about any military regime in Nigeria.
Badenoch, nee Adegoke, the former Secretary of State for Business and Trade under prime minister Rishi Sunak, was born in Wimbledon in 1980 and spent her childhood in Nigeria before returning to the UK at 16 in 1996. Nigeria was under military rule from 1983 until Badenoch came back to the UK. From 1983 Nigeria, was under military juntas headed by Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha.
Nobody with a passing knowledge of socialism would have described those regimes as “socialist”. They all followed the diktats of the “Washington Consensus”, and were allies of Western regimes and multinational corporations. Abacha, for example, was alleged to have collaborated with oil major Shell and British intelligence in dealing with environmental activists in the Niger Delta region. Nigeria’s first bout of major privatisations started in line with IMF prescriptions under Babangida.
In the early days of the Buhari and Babangida regimes, there were some elements of welfare statism in Nigeria in the form of free tuition, some state-owned enterprises and some centralised economic planning, but nothing that restricted private enterprise in any shape or form, except for the opponents of those regimes.
It may be asking too much, but if Badenoch is remotely interested in righting the wrongs in the UK via first leading the Tories, and possibly leading the country in the next five years, she may want to recognise that “socialism” is not a dirty word and the truth about her past in Nigeria matters. She would do well to listen to US President Harry Truman who said in 1952:
Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.
Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labour organisations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
