By Femi Fani-Kayode
“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 tarred and feathered for the sort of 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 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.
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.
‘Stockholm Syndrome’
I suspect that those that 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 affection for those who seek to place them in servitude and who treat them with contempt.
The victims of this malaise are masochists.
Her Nigerian cheerleaders have a chip on their shoulder.
They are unpatriotic and have no honor.
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 that 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.
She reminds me of the creature that the black American leader, Malcom X, described as “a house n*gger”.
In order to comprehend her self-loathing and reprehensible mindset, I urge those that are interested to read the black French writer Franz Fanon’s book titled, ‘Black Skin, White Mask’.
The author had the likes of Badenoch in mind when he compiled this insightful masterpiece.
Kemi is a willing tool of the colonialists, neo-colonialists and imperialists and she is everything that any patriotic Nigerian and every Pan Africanist should despise.
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 heart-wrenching and whose cut was “the deepest of all”.
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.
Such a person is nothing but a specious liar, an unconscionable opportunist, a bigoted racist and a cheap political hustler who will do or say anything, including selling her own people down the river, for political power.
Racism
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 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 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 that 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 absolve her of her rancid bigotry and does not constrain me to 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.
Even if she was a mass murderer those that think like that would still hail her because she is Yoruba.
This surely is not our way and neither does it bring honor to our name.
We must judge her on what she says and does and not on the basis of her tribe, gender, nationality, religious faith or the color of her skin.
Outside of that it says a lot about the values of the British Conservative Party.
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.
Those misguided Nigerians that celebrate her simply because she is from our shores are hugging a snake that hates them with passion.
Eventually she will turn around and bite them and they will curse the day that she was born.
Fear
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, mendacity, religious bigotry, tribalism and racism, 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 includes the ugly events in Chibok, Northern Nigeria ten years ago when over two hundred schoolgirls were kidnapped!
She also said that Muslims that 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!
She is blind to the fact that those advocating for reparations rightly believe that the UK and the rest of the West should make up for the damage that they did through slavery.
@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 perfidy, deceit, intellectual bareness 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 finish using her, they will flush her down the toilet like the turd.
She deserves no better.
· Chief Femi Fani-Kayode is the Sadaukin Shinkafi, a former Minister of Aviation and a former Minister of Culture and Tourism of Nigeria
