Kemi Badenoch, the British Conservative party leader is back in the news with her four British legs good, two Nigerian legs bad vituperations. In her very first public speech in 2025 she went on about not wanting Britain to become like Nigeria where the government destroys lives.
Speaking at an event organised by Onward, a right-wing think tank, on 16 January, she said “I grew up in a poor country and watched my relatively wealthy family become poorer and poorer, despite working harder and harder as their money disappeared with inflation”. According to her, she lived with these as “consequences of terrible governments that destroy lives” in Nigeria and she would “never, ever want it to happen here”; here being Britain.
Badenoch was simply repeating what she had said using other words several times before, particularly in the last months of 2024. And we should expect her to continue with spewing such diatribe comprising a mish-mash of lies, half-truths and deliberate misconceptions.
An “authenticity” of fraudulence
She and her official minders pass it all off as her being authentic and simply saying things the way they are. There are even a number of Nigerians, including working-class people and middle-class professionals who ask that “isn’t (some of) what she says true? Are things not bad in Nigeria because of ‘our’ bad leaders?”
But Kemi Badenoch does not really care about the truth. She is simply pandering to the White British audience, particularly its right-wing that the Conservative party wants to cohere around itself in the face of stiff competition from Nigel Farage’s Reform party. She is stylishly assuring them that while she might not exactly be bright in terms of delivering when saddled with concrete work, she will put blacks, women, immigrants and such like in their rightful place of scorn as underlings in British society.
A constant theme in Badenoch’s tales by moonlight is that, she did not have it easy in Nigeria despite being from a middle-class family. She has hinted, without explicitly saying that she had to walk for miles to fetch water for use at home, and also made claims of having to take her chair to school. But this is quite easily shown to be a big fat lie for several reasons.
She grew up in Itire, Surulere Lagos, where potable water was the thing well before she was born and at the time she lived there. Besides, her father was a medical doctor whose hospital was in the same building as their place of residence. His main corporate clients were international oil companies. Can you imagine any private hospital and particularly one servicing oil companies to operate without a regular supply of water? The clear answer is no. And it does not make sense that the hospital will have pipe borne water but not the residence.
Her cock and bull story of carrying chairs to school in Lagos where she grew up is another barefaced lie. Even Jakande public schools had chairs, not to talk of the elite International School Lagos (ISL) which she attended. Her mother was a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos (Unilag) at the time. ISL was domiciled in the Unilag premises.
It is also laughable for Kemi to claim that her family witnessed poverty despite being middle class people that were shuttling from Nigeria to the United States and Britain when she was not schooling at ISL. Yes, it was a period of economic crisis. But it was not simply a result of bad governance or limited to Nigeria. It was a period of global capitalist crisis, just like what we are witnessing now. Even Britain “entered a prolonged recession” in the 1970s, as the House of Lords admits.
Socialist Nigeria? No, the root of the problem in Nigeria and globally is capitalism
The number of unemployed people in Britain more than doubled between 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister and 1984, rising from 1.5 million to 3.2 million, as the country entered yet another recession.
The British ruling class, as part of the imperialist overlords of capitalism, made poor working-class people in Britain and across the globe bear the burden of economic recovery with neoliberal capitalist policies that have increasingly made life ever more unbearable for working people globally, over the last four and a half decade.
It must however be pointed out that what Kemi repeatedly describes as poverty was more inconvenience than poverty. At that same period, there were families where upwards of six people slept in a single room in face-me-I-face your compounds, sharing toilets, bathrooms and kitchens with other families.
Poverty was about not being able to eat three square meals, or buy school books. It was about actually having to walk miles to fetch water from streams in the rural areas or at some borehole or the other several streets away in the cities, rather than lying later in life about doing so, as Badenoch does.
These are just a few of the stupid lies and distortions of our dear Kemi. If it were not that it speaks volumes of the extent she would go to demonise her Nigerian past just to win favour from the Conservative and right-wing White base she is courting in Britain, the most humorous of her claims would be that she grew up in a socialist country.
There were a few African states in the 1960s to 1980s that laid claim to being socialist or even Marxist. Several of them were ruled by military juntas, such as in Ethiopia and the Republic of Benin. It takes only a malevolent stretch of the wildest imagination to describe the Nigeria Badenoch lived in as anything even near socialist.
In fact, the Nigerian governments before her birth and during her life here were rabidly anti-socialist. Laws were passed against socialist literature by some of them and socialist parties like the Socialist Workers and Farmers Party (SWAFP) and the Socialist Working People’s Party (SWPP) were hounded. And that is not all.
The Nigeria she lived through was when neoliberalism was nurtured into the norm with the introduction of an IMF/World Bank-inspired structural adjustment programme (SAP) by the Ibrahim Babangida-led junta in 1986. How on earth could she be so bold as to come up with the barefaced lie that she lived in a socialist country?!
It’s simple to understand her tactics with her key objective which we have already identified. And part of this is seizing every moment she can to denigrate her roots, as a loyal house slave. Even when the moments do not present themselves, she creates them.
A good example is her rambling once again last week about the “poor country” she grew up in, when her speech was supposed to be about how the Conservative party intends to “rebuild trust with the British people.” And barely a month before that, she had given a similar performance when she was asked about what she thought of the British police.
In Nigeria, Britain and everywhere, the police serve the bosses
There was absolutely no reference to Nigeria or the Nigerian police by the television anchor. But what was Kemi’s response? “My experience with the Nigerian police was very negative. However, my experience with the British police was very positive when I came to the UK.”
“The police in Nigeria will rob us”, she said, as if we didn’t know and have not been fighting police brutality. She probably never heard of the #EndSARS rebellion. But the British police, she implied, were saviours, as if it is not a rotten, racist repressive instrument of the British state.
It was not only the much hated Nigerian police she rubbished though. Talking about the country and its people she added that “it’s a very poor country. People do all sorts of things”. She echoed that “poor country” trope in January. Obviously it’s an important element of the façade of her Uncle Tom’s cabin. But it is a point that we must question.
Is Nigeria not a very rich country with poor people? And why is the immense majority of the country’s population poor? Is it simply because the leaders are corrupt? Is it not that there are systematic issues of capitalist exploitation and a heritage of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism and neocolonial pillage with Britain as the arrowhead of imperialism for centuries, alongside the local thieving ruling class as their junior partners?
And does the poverty of the poor people in Nigeria mean we get to only “do all sorts of things” as she puts it? No, there is empathy, love, kindness and solidarity amongst us, alongside “all sorts of things” which also take place everywhere else as well.
Shameless play of ethnic bigotry card; when it suits Kemi
The hypocrisy of this British Conservative party leader and her utter disregard for playing a divisive ethnic card when it suits her is best reflected in her finding it “interesting” that everyone, as she says, defines her as “being Nigerian”. She identifies “less with the country” she claims “than with the specific ethnicity (Yorùbá)”.
As if that were not enough, she added that “I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where Islamism is” and adds that “northern people of Nigeria…were our ethnic enemies”.
What arrant nonsense? When this same Kemi Badenoch was running for parliament for the first time (and lost) in 2010, she did not focus on her Yorùbá heritage. She cried out to the entire Nigerian community in her constituency, saying “Nigerians have been fantastic, but with the race being stiff “I need your help”
At that time she told Nigerians in Britain that “like you, I am sick and tired of reading that Nigerians are fraudsters, terrorists, bombing airplanes, or slaughtering each other in places like Jos”. And she made what turned out to be empty promises even before becoming Conservative leader, to push for legislation that would benefit Nigerians in Britain and back home.
This of course is acting true to type as the liar and political hustler that she is. It should be pointed out that even her claim that “Adégòkè, her birth surname “is a name for people who were warriors” that “protected the crown” is yet another typically petty lie, to market herself as a loyal defender of the British crown.
The name simply means the crown (or royalty) has ascended or risen higher. It has absolutely nothing to do with warriors defending the crown or anything whatsoever, except in Kemi’s wickedly fecund imagination.
Unveiling the liar is not about patriotism; it’s about class
Several people in Nigeria have criticised Kemi Badenoch’s vituperations from a nationalist perspective. These include government officials like Kashim Shettima, the Vice President of Nigeria and more recently, Daniel Bwala, the gun-for-hire spokesperson of President Bola Tinubu.
As working-class and youth activists, we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into this diversionary route. What Badenoch is primarily doing in Britain is the same thing the ruling class in Nigeria does: mobilising ethno-nationalist identity to serve a political end. The secondary differences only reflect the differences in context.
The different sections of the ruling class in Nigeria mobilise their base based on shared ethnic and regional affiliations, while othering the ethnic groups of their main contenders, as we saw with the anti-Igbo politics during the 2023 elections. Kemi on her own part prides herself on being “Labour’s worst nightmare” because she can pander to the whims and delight of a right-wing base that the Tories are now battling for influence over with Nigel Farage’s Reform party, without being able to be painted as being “prejudiced”, because she is black, and on top of that from Nigeria; the big black wolf, so to speak.
This also explains why she has put forward such claptrap as the need for former British colonies to be grateful for being colonised and arguing that Britain is the best place to be Black. “She’s saying what potential supporters want to hear” as Nels Abbey pointed out. But her politics should not be seen strictly through the lens of race and ethno-nationalist identity, She has also argued that maternity pay is “excessive”, and people had to exercise “more personal responsibility”.
An often repeated nationalist argument by the merry band of patriots against Kemi Badenoch is that former Tory leader and prime minister Rishi Sunak was not in the habit of lambasting India, as Badenoch always does with Nigeria, despite similarities between both countries such as mass poverty, corruption and the maddening spices of chaotic social life.
But, there is an important underlying point of note, beyond the first or last refuge of patriotism, which this perspective fails to grasp. This is the difference between the confidence of the big bourgeoisie and the hustler’s spirit of those who rise from the professional-middle-class background to the height of political service in capital.
Sunak was the richest man in the British parliament when he became prime minister. His multi-billionaire father-in-law is one of the richest persons in the world. Bashing India with talk of poverty and all such like “would not be sweet in his mouth”, as the Yorùbá would put it.
Badenoch does not care for an abstract rich Britain encompassing everybody any more than the “poor Nigeria” picture she latches on to prop her self-serving narrative. She stands for the rich in Britain is simply out to discipline poor working-class families in furtherance of the expansion of capital, like Margaret Thatcher the milk snatcher in whose steps she hopes to walk. And her kind of politics comes naturally to her because on top of it all, she is a bully who is reported to create “an intimidating atmosphere” that is toxic for her subordinates at work.
Conclusion
There are some of those who have added their voices in support of Kemi Badenoch, at different times, out of a genuine sense of pride at seeing a Nigerian woman rise to such a place of pride in British politics. Some of them, like Matthew Hassan Kukah, the fiery Catholic bishop in Sokoto even send her kind thoughts and prayers for pulling of such a feat.
Unfortunately, taking this position is to become like the trees in the forest, in that Turkish proverb, which felt happy that the axe was one of them because its handle was made of wood. The result was the shrinking of the forest as that axe had an easy ride cutting down the trees that had thus lowered their guard, or if you might say wey don loose guard.
There is nothing there to be proud of for working-class people in Nigeria, or even in Britain for that matter, or anywhere in the world, in having someone at the high table of fostering our exploitation. And besides, we should never hope to have daughters or sons, or brothers or sisters who are liars, hustlers and bullies; like Kemi.
by Bàbá AYÉ
