Kemi Badenoch, the newly-elected leader of the Conservative Party in the UK said in an interview with The Spectator magazine: “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.”
It appears she was responding to Nigerian vice president Kashim Shettima, who is from northern Nigeria and specifically from Borno State, the epicentre of the Islamic fundamentalist terror group Boko Haram’s insurgency. But Badenoch, appears too ignorant to know which particular state Shettima is from. The vice president said on Tuesday that Badenoch was “denigrating her country of origin.” He contrasted her with former prime minister Rishi Sunak as a “brilliant young man, he never denigrated his nation of ancestry [India].” Shettima also suggested that Badenoch “has even every right to remove the Kemi from her name”.
Vice president Kashim Shettima
That bit must have struck a nerve with someone born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in London in 1980 to Nigerian parents and was taken back to Nigeria, where she lived until she was 16 before returning to the UK. She has since been trying to distance herself from the country of her formative years at every opportunity. It has been suggested that Badenoch’s mother gave birth to her in the UK so she could be entitled to a British passport, as the parents lived in Nigeria at the time of her birth. But since she has been in the limelight as a Tory MP, she has tried to make political capital by criticising immigration.
As if hypocritically knocking immigration wasn’t bad enough, Badenoch never misses an opportunity to “throw Nigeria under the bus”, in the words of another British-Nigerian, Shola Mos-Shogbamimu.
Kemi Badenoch blasted for always “throwing Nigeria under the bus”
The contradictions wrapped up in Badenoch’s diminutive body should come as no surprise remembering what the late, great poet Benjamin Zephaniah said: “Somebody once asked me when we were talking about animals what the strangest animal I’d ever seen was. I said a black Tory. To me, that’s a very strange animal”. When asked whether the Tory Party was a racist organisation he replied: “This is the party that was racist to me, the party built on racism and empire. Now it’s the party of Windrush. The racism I experience that comes from institutions comes from policies from the Tory Party. The racist things I hear from politicians? The Tory Party. That has been my life experience, and I’m surprised now that isn’t coming up in conversation more”.
Zephaniah went on to describe the likes of then Tory minister Kwasi Kwarteng: “I’d go so far as to say they’re like house slaves”. Mos-Shogbamimu echoed this when she said Badenoch was the “black face of white supremacy”. Another British-Nigerian, the writer Nels Abbey, called Badenoch “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”. While the Tories can point at their elevation of the likes of Badenoch and Kwarteng and use it to proclaim they are not racist, American activist Mumia Abu-Jamal reminded us that “black faces in high places doesn’t mean freedom”. There were black overseers in slave plantations and some of them cracked the whip harder than white overseers to impress the plantation owner.
This is the context in which the likes of Badenoch try too hard to be even more hard-line anti-migrant and anti-Nigerian than the type of racists that vote Tory. She even tries to beat them on ignorance. Her comments about northern Nigeria is a lazy stereotype about “Islamism” and people “I have nothing in common with”. While the majority of northern Nigerians are Muslims, the region has a significant Christian population. There’s also the reality that about half of Badenoch’s Yoruba ethnic group are Muslims. The “Chibok girls” who were kidnapped by Boko Haram from their school in vice president Shettima’s state in 2014 were mostly Christian. Is Badenoch trying to claim she has nothing in common with young girls struggling to get an education against significant odds?
She read engineering at the University of Sussex and it’s hard to imagine she didn’t come across any students there from northern Nigeria. There were 44,000 Nigerian students in British institutions in 2021-22, a proportion of them would have come from the north. One thing Badenoch is likely to not have in common with these young Nigerians is being in denial about their identity. Since Nigeria has dominated the music, movie and cultural scene in terms of what is hip in Africa, despite the failures of governance in the country, you would struggle to find any young Nigerian that is not proud to “rep” the country. Badenoch, while intent on impressing a narrow band of Tory racists, is trying her worst to alienate the young British-Nigerian vote.
Kemi and father Femi
Her dad, Femi Adegoke, was a doctor. It is likely that he was a lot more informed about Nigeria than his daughter but probably didn’t tell her that the first doctor from northern Nigeria, Barau Dikko, graduated from the University of Birmingham and started practising in Nigeria in 1940 – long before Badenoch’s dad went to medical school. Dikko’s kids, and the thousands of others born to doctors from northern Nigeria after Dikko, surely have something in common with Badenoch that she can’t see when blinded by lazy stereotyping.
Badenoch’s ignorance is only matched by her lying. Like she did when she claimed she grew up under a “socialist military government” in Nigeria.
