Kemi Badenoch’s living hell

“I don’t want this country to turn into the one I ran away from”- Kemi Badenoch MP.

The Right Honorable Kemi Badenoch MP, former minister of women and equalities of the United Kingdom and the newly-elected leader of the British Conservative Party deserves to be reprimanded over the things she says about Nigeria.

Apart from her insulting categorisations about Northern Nigerian Muslims, which I shall come to later in this contribution, this woman had the impudence to describe Nigeria, her country of origin, 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”.

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 us thieves and labelling us as being corrupt and inept.

She snubbed the federal government on two occasions by ignoring them when they attempted to reach out to her through 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. 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. I suspect that those who do this may well be suffering from a disease known as “Stockholm syndrome”. This affliction causes its victims to fall in love with their oppressors. It compels them to cultivate an affection for those who seek to place them in servitude and who treat them with contempt.

Her Nigerian cheerleaders have a chip on their shoulders. They are unpatriotic and have no honour. No matter how much she pisses on the graves of our heroes past and defecates on our flag they continue to worship her. This is pitiful. It is a reflection of their malevolent disposition towards their own country and their low self-esteem.

We may have issues as a nation but we must never support those that denigrate our country for political gain. Kemi sold her soul to the right wing of the British Tory party and sought to put to shame the land of her forefathers just to become their leader. Nothing can be more despicable than that.

I have seen many attempts to rationalise her insolence and none make any sense. Loving those who hate you and consider you to not only be their inferior but also sub-human, in my view, is not a virtue but a vice.

The demonisation of our country should not be a pre-requisite to winning a leadership contest of a political party in a foreign land and if it is one cannot expect any self-respecting Nigerian to applaud it. Her victory in the contest for the leadership of the UK’s Conservative Party does not in any way ameliorate my disgust and repugnance for her or the foul stench that trails her wherever she goes.

Kemi is a dangerous and willing tool of the colonialists, neo-colonialists and imperialists. Unless and until she purges herself of her contempt, I shall continue to regard her in the same light as William Shakespeare’s character Brutus whose treachery and betrayal was heartrenching and whose cut was “the deepest of all”.

Again she reminds me of the character known as Richard Rich in William Bolt’s famous play titled ‘A Man For All Seasons’ who betrayed England’s most famous martyr Sir Thomas Moore and sent him to the gallows with his false testimony and lies in return for a title and landed property in the province of Wales!

It is in the same way that Kemi has betrayed, misrepresented and murdered Nigeria in return for her position as leader of the opposition in the UK. Anyone who calls my country “hell on earth” is fair game and this is especially if that person does so in order to curry favour with members of her political party and win their support.

Institutional racism is real in the UK and 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 negative stereotyping of Africa and Africans in order to be accepted into the highest echelons of the British political class.

The Bible asks, “what profiteth a man to lose his soul in order to gain the world”. I ask, what profiteth a woman to lose 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 criticise 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 uncivilised, 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 who has displayed such disdain for our people achieves anything simply because that person has her roots in my country or in my ethnic nationality.

The fact that Kemi is of Yoruba descent does not give her a free pass. To those from Yorubaland who say we must celebrate her despite her foibles because she is Yoruba, I ask the following: must we support a Yoruba who hates her ancestry, heritage, values and culture and who sees and says nothing good in our history?

Must we endorse the acts and words of an individual who has denied us before the world, who has nothing good to say about us and who has insulted and denigrated our forefathers? Surely doing so would be the height of clannish and cultic behaviour and an inglorious display of a crude and primitive disposition. We are far bigger and better than that.

We must judge her on what she says and does and not on the basis of her tribe, gender, nationality, religious faith or the colour of her skin.

Outside of that, it says a lot about the values of the British Conservative Party when a dangerously ambitious figure could be elected as their leader. This is a far cry from the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. I have little doubt that they both turned in their graves upon hearing about Badenoch’s ascension in the firm knowledge that their party had been handed a poisoned chalice.

The truth is that I fear for the plight of the Nigerian community in the UK in the unlikely event of her ever being elected Prime Minister.

Permit me to end this contribution with the following.

In Kemi’s most graphic display of ignorance, she said that she does not believe that Northern Nigerian Muslims should be allowed into the UK because they are, in her view, “Islamists”.

She went on to say that Northern Muslims support terror and that an example of this is the ugly events in Chibok, Northern Nigeria ten years ago when over two hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped! She also said that Muslims who do not support Israel in its relentless ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and its genocidal acts in Gaza are “not welcome in the UK”.

The fact that she had to single out Nigeria and cast aspersions on the character of no less than 50% of our population describing them as “Islamists” and alluding to the malicious falsehood that they are terrorists speaks volumes.

On the quest for reparations for the slave trade, Badenoch had the following to say: “This is the past. We need to talk about the future. There are many countries now that want to use guilt to try and exploit the UK. They ask for reparations. I saw it as a Trade Minister. It’s not culture wars. I was at the WTO, I won’t name the Minister from another country and he was telling me that we needed to give up some of the things we were doing because of colonialism and because they needed time to develop. These arguments are a scam. Don’t fall for it. We need to make sure that we put this country first. We work well with our neighbours, we work with other countries but we have to look after ourselves too.”

Imagine this coming from a black African woman millions of whose ancestors were enslaved and shipped off to the West!

@Africa.Echo put it well when they posted the following on X: “Germany and the rest of the West continue to provide financial recompense to Israel but Kemi Badenoch believes Africans do not deserve reparations for decades of colonialism and centuries of enslavement.”

If Kemi’s views about the quest for reparations do not open the eyes of Badenoch’s Nigerian cheerleaders, nothing will. She also stands against multi-culturalism even though she is the leader of the opposition in a multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-religious nation and she is married to a white English man.

What a contradiction!

She says she believes that “not all cultures are equally valid” and from her divisive rhetoric, it is clear that she also believes that not all races are equally valid either.

An even greater contradiction is the fact that she is staunchly anti-immigration.

She asserts that “Britain must not be a sponge for migrants” forgetting that she is a first-generation migrant and a beneficiary of the British immigration system that she now seeks to discredit. These contradictions and asinine assertions betray a level of intellectual barrenness and scholarly ineptitude that beggars belief.

Another display of her crass ignorance is her assertion that Nigeria, a country that she was raised in, has been run by “socialist governments”.

This is arrant nonsense.

I guess her definition of “socialism” is anything that does not share her fascist, ultra-conservative, neo-colonialist and neo-imperialist views.

The irony of it all is that, despite her pretence at being more English than the English and more conservative than Enoch Powell, by the time the British right wing is done using her, they will discard her.

She deserves no better.

Femi Fani-Kayode is the Sadaukin Shinkafi, a former minister of aviation, and former minister of culture and tourism of Nigeria