The Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, recently went viral over her comments on the perfidy of sandwiches and “moist bread” in an interview with the Spectator. The comment was met with glee, quips and comedic clapbacks from political rivals. Yet a few lines down in the exact same interview, Badenoch made comments, less noticed, more inflammatory, that should be eye-wateringly beneath the holder of the office of Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition.
“I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian,” she said. “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.”
As someone of British-Nigerian origins myself, I can ignore the blood, soil and pounded yam approach to Yoruba sectarianism (which is a long way from the Nigerians for Kemi campaign she desperately pulled together when running for a diverse London seat in 2010). I’ll put aside the fact that she conveniently didn’t mention who did that “lumping” at gunpoint (that is, Britain). But it does occur that this “ethnic enemies” rhetoric sits a bit too easily in Hutu v Tutsi territory, or Biafra (Nigerian civil war) territory. It is the exact sort of rhetoric that leads to major conflicts in fragile yet highly diverse nations such as Nigeria, whose maps were drawn by colonialists. Making matters worse, it offers not even an iota of sympathy for the principal victims of Boko Haram’s brutal reign of terrorism: northern Nigerians.
Nigeria looms large for Badenoch, and not always in a good way.
“Do you trust the British police?” asked an American podcaster last month. A Booker prizewinner would struggle to craft a segue in which such a question would lead to a diatribe about policing in Nigeria (about 5,000 miles away from Britain) and the alleged theft of her brother’s shoes. And then a swivel, deploying that alleged experience with Nigerian police to dismiss the concerns Britons (especially Black Britons) rightfully have about British police. “The police in Nigeria would rob us, she said. “So when people say I have this bad experience with the police because I’m black and they’re white, I’m ‘what the hell?’.”
Nigerian policing presents serious issues. But from racism to theft, to assault and murder, so does British policing. Even Nigerian police might have thought twice about placing a gun in the hand of Wayne Couzens, the Met officer nicknamed “the rapist” by his colleagues, and who used his badge to facilitate heinous assault and murder.
From her “reparations are a scam” comment to a live GB News audience, through her appallingly dismissive attitudes at parliamentary Black History Month debates, to UN accusations of attempting to normalise white supremacy with the Sewell report, along with the flagrant bullying of award-winning, groundbreaking Black journalists such as Nadine White, Rianna Croxford and Reni Eddo-Lodge, Badenoch has established a discernible and deeply worrying pattern of behaviour. She regularly seems to offer the concerns and lives of one minority or the other (especially Black and Brown people) as a sacrificial political gift at the altar of white supremacy.
That plays one way here, but differently in Nigeria.
Keir Starmer and a good slice of our media class welcomed Badenoch’s elevation to the party leadership as a “proud moment for our country”. Nigerian media figures never speak with one voice, but for some the talk was of a person “desperately trying to please the conservative white establishment” and “subjugating her own people to make Britain look good in the face of white nationalism”.
Her denigration of Nigeria (a brutally capitalist nation without as much as a hint of a welfare estate; nevertheless derided by her as “socialist”) forced the vice-president, Kashim Shettima, to publicly rebuke her. Rishi Sunak never “denigrated his nation of ancestry [India]”, Shettima pointed out. If the association rankles, she could “remove the Kemi from her name”, he said. His comments won applause from the audience.
Like Badenoch, I was born in Britain and eventually went to live in Nigeria for some of my formative years. Though she enjoyed a fantastically more privileged upbringing than me (she was privately educated and lived in one of the continent’s wealthiest neighbourhoods), the events and circumstances that shaped the scars of Badenoch’s youth in Nigeria also shaped mine. The democracy and security-crushing folly of dictators such as Ibrahim Babangida, who Margaret Thatcher likened to herself for “strong and independent views”, and Sani Abacha led to economic collapse, plunging standards of living for average Nigerians and effectively helped Nigeria become a byword for corruption.
Yet for all Nigeria’s flaws, Badenoch and I both received a better education there than we would probably have had as inner-city working-class Black children in the UK at the time. And it goes further than that: we were also gifted cultural awareness, language skills, knowledge of self, confidence in self, debating skills and consistent exposure to successful people who looked like us. Rocky as it was, this helps explain why so many Nigerians (and their offspring) are swiftly emerging at the top of western societies.
It’s time for a truce. Badenoch could leave Nigeria alone (and Black and Brown people more broadly), and perhaps Nigeria could reciprocate, because the truth is, she has troubles enough. The Tory left thinks she’s too rightwing, the Tory right thinks she is not rightwing enough – and Nigel Farage thinks she and her party, gobbled up by Reform UK, would make a lovely supper.
They see through you in Nigeria, Kemi, so focus on the day job: you and Nigeria would be better for it.
Nels Abbey is an author, broadcaster and the founder of Uppity: the Intellectual Playground
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