Our personality this week is a Nigerian, the Right Honourable Kemi Badenoch MP, former Minister of Women and Equalities of the United Kingdom and newly-elected leader of the British Conservative Party.
As the new leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch becomes the first black to hold that position. She defeated Robert Jenrick in the month-long election, which was announced last week, haven polled 53,806 votes against Jenrick’s 41,388 to suspect Rishi Sunak as Britain’s opposition leader.
With the victory, she takes over a Conservative Party still reeling from the loss it suffered during the general election in July. The 44-year-old served as shadow business and Trade Secretary since the Labour Party took over the Downing Street.
After her victory, Badenoch said the Tories let “standard slip”, adding that the party must “set off Conservative pledges that appeal to the British people” before the next election. “We have to be honest – honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip. The time has come to tell the truth”, the new Tory leader said.
“The task that stands before us is tough but simple. Our first responsibility as His Majesty’s loyal opposition is to hold this Labour government to account. “Our second is no less important. It is to prepare, over the course of the next few years, for government to ensure that by the time of the next election, we have not just a clear set of Conservative pledges that appeal to the British people, but a clear plan to change this country by changing the way that government works”.
Interestingly, Bedenoch first showed interest in becoming the leader of the Conservative Party in 2022, but she was eliminated in the fourth round of voting. Badenoch, who grew up in Nigeria, has a reputation within and outside the party for her outspoken stance against immigration. She has been vocal about support for colonialism.
She was born on January 2, 1980 in Wimbledon, London, and she is one of three children born to Nigerian Yoruba parents. Her father, Femi Adegoke, was a Professor of Physiology. She has a brother and a sister. She spent her childhood living in Lagos, Nigeria, and in the United States, where her mother lectured, and returned to the UK at the age of 16 to live with a friend of her mother, owing to the deteriorating political and economic situation in Nigeria, which had affected her family.
Although a British citizen and born in the UK, during her parliamentary maiden speech, Badenoch stated thet she was “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant”.
Ex-prime minister Boris Johnson lauded her “courage and clarity” and said she “brings a much needed zing and zap to the Conservative Party”. “Kemi has exactly the right courage and clarity to expose Starmer’s failing”, he said.
In a social media post, prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer said, “The first Black leader of a West-minister party is a proud moment for our country”. “I look forward to working with you and your party in the interest of the British people”, he said.
But what got me thinking and interested in this week’s personality was the very critical remark, made by Nigeria’s former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode about her. Femi Fani-Kayode had titled his piece on her in the Vanguard newspaper of November 10 as: Kemi Badenoch’s “Living Hell.” In the piece, he recalled and criticized Kemi Badenoch as once saying, “I don’t want this country (Referring to Britain) to turn into the one I ran away from” (Referring to Nigeria), and he says, Kemi Badenoch deserves to be tarred and feathered for the sort of things she says about Nigeria.
Femi Fani-Kayode went on to say that, apart from Kemi Badenoch’s insulting categorisation about Northern Nigerian Muslims, which he shall come to later in his piece, this woman had the impudence to describe Nigeria, her country of region, as a “living hell”, a place where she had to “walk one mile to get running water,” and a country where “lizards run out of the taps!”.
Beyond that, he said, she constantly launches heavy salvos against the Nigerian people and our ruling elites, including politicians, Legislators, members of the Judiciary and those that are in the private sector, calling them thieves and labelling them as corrupt and inept.
“She snubbed the Federal Government on two occasions by ignoring them when they attempted to reach out to her through Mrs. Abike Dabiri – Eweka, president Bola Tinubu’s Special Advisor on the Diaspora, which provoked the latter to say that she was yet “to find the Nigerianess in her. As far as Kemi Badenoch is concerned, Nigeria is a land of demons whilst the UK is a nation of angels.
“She forgets that the country that she lives in has a long history of corruption, looting and barbarism and that London remains the world’s capital for money laundering,” Femi Fani-Kayode said in his piece.
He went on to say, “Again, unlike the UK, Nigeria is not supporting the Holocaust in Gaza and is not complicit in the genocide that has been unleashed on the palestinians. Sadly, some of our people have not only applauded her for her offensive sentiments but have also become her loudest cheerleaders.”
Femi Fani-Kayode, who is known for being frank on issues, posited in his piece that, institutional racism is real in the UK, adding that, the worst type of racist is a self – hating black African who feels the need to rubbish his heritage, who believes that he must disparage the land of his forefathers and who consistently reinforces the wnegative stereotyping of Africans in order to be accepted into the highest echelons of the British political class.
The Bible, he said asks, “What profiteth a man to lose his soul and gain the world”? I ask, what profiteth a woman to loose her dignity and self-respect In return for the leadership of a political party in a distant land? This is made worse by the fact that it is a political party whose star has dimmed, whose days of glory are over and which may not be back in power for the next ten years!.
The truth is, even if the Englanders proclaimed Kemi Badenoch as their Queen, yours truly will continue to loathe her because she has contempt for my country. 250 million people live in Nigeria and she is not the dark, evil, beast-infested forest and wild jungle that Badenoch portrays her to be. She is not filled with ignorant, grass skirt-wearing, ape-looking, monkey-sounding, primitive barbarians and heinous cannibals that she would have others believe. We are not a land of sub-human creatures that have no decency, no decorum, no knowledge, no heritage and no history. We are not uncivilized, we do not live in trees, we do not behave like animals and neither are we godless, unruly, ignorant or incompetent .
Just like any other country, including the UK itself, we are not infallible and we have our own fair share of flaws and challenges. Yet, that does not diminish us and I am not constrained to feel any sense of elation when a person that has displayed such disdain for our people achieves anything simply because that person has her root in my county or in my ethnic nationality. Femi Fani-Kayode wrote.
