An outdated assessment of northern Nigeria, leaning into ethnic stereotypes, makes Badenoch ill-suited for national leadership in the UK.
Regardless of our political differences, Kemi Badenoch has undoubtedly broken records. Her rise to be the leader of the Conservative Party is an achievement, albeit after many failures of leadership, but I shan’t take that victory away from her.
As a black woman in Britain, to be the very first to ascend to a position of power like this, is definitely a feat. However, as I have said elsewhere, if this is what it takes to actually have a seat at the table then I don’t need to be there.
Even then as a young person in my 20s, full to the brim with ambition and excited to pursue a career in politics, I was not willing to capitulate all of my values to simply gain power. This is where Kemi and I differ.
Unfortunately, she has fully executed her strategy to play whichever role gets her further ahead. This is exemplified by recent comments on Nigeria, and her about-face about her Christianity. She now declares that she “doesn’t believe in God” and instead is opting to identify as a “cultural Christian”. This is a very different Kemi from the one I met.
When I met Kemi, she had recently gotten a role as a London assembly member, by default, inheriting it from people who were selected to be members of parliament. She lost to Tessa Jowell in Dulwich & West Norwood in 2010 and missed out on selection in Banbury in 2014 and Eddisbury in 2015.
So, it was the victories of others in the May 2015 general election that saw her get into the Assembly, her first political position, and she has never served as councillor.
Her selection to run as an MP in Saffron Walden was strategic on the Conservatives part, in fact one may even say a result of DEI policies (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), which she so often rails against.
Kemi Badenoch, the DEI candidate
David Cameron felt they needed to court young ethnic minorities into the Conservative party to have a fighting chance against Labour, so they created an ‘A-list’ of ethnic minority and women MP’s to put forward for ‘safe seats’.
Saffron Walden is one of the safest conservative seats in the country, having only ever voted Conservative party since 1922. It’s debatable that her winning that seat has much to do with her, rather than a local commitment to the wider Conservative party.
She has not had to face the broader voting public yet; in the Conservative leadership race she could rely on a significantly weakened Conservative party, after a stunning defeat in the 2024 general elections which saw them lose nearly 70% of their seats in the House of Commons and nearly a quarter of their membership from 2022 to 2024.
This context is important, because Kemi has little experience actually earning the admiration of the wider public across her entire political career. She is largely a product of the Conservative DEI policies and she is well aware of this, because she shared this with me too.
Her reasoning for me joining the Conservative Party was directly predicated on this, as she shared with me all the ways in which ethnic minorities are supported into leadership roles within the Conservative Party vs Labour, who unfortunately were doing an awful job at supporting the ethnic minority MPs in their party.
At the time, I was also running the young professionals subgroup of the Nigerians in the Square Mile, a think-tank focused on bridging the gap between Nigeria and its diaspora based in the United Kingdom.
She was excited to meet because she felt Nigerian city professionals would be more amenable to the Conservative Party. She spoke about how proud she was to be a Nigerian too – often code switching her accent depending on the context.
Identity as a commodity for ambition
I genuinely believed she had good intentions, but it became clear that she meant to commodify identity for political ambition. Her plan was to convince Nigerians that she was going to represent their interests, court their support and also benefit from the Conservative DEI policies to manoeuvre within the party to rise up through the ranks, with little testing.
As a result, the Whatsapp chat she created called ‘Nigerians for Conservatives’ became a nightmare. As she spoke more openly about her views on a number of topics, it became clear that she was less concerned with historical accuracy or the truth and more with being combative or contrarian whenever it suited her political ambition.
Admitting she didn’t care about colonialism was simply the last straw for me, but there were numerous conversations which revealed her xenophobia towards Caribbean communities and hostility towards other Nigerians.
This brings me to her recent comments about identifying as Yoruba as opposed to Nigerian, and the Islamophobic subtext of her distancing herself from northern Nigeria, which she generalised as a haven for Boko Haram and Islamists, and called them her “ethnic enemies”.
Not only is this rhetoric dangerous and inflammatory, stoking ethnic tensions both domestically in the UK and in Nigeria, it’s dishonest. Kemi largely grew up in Lagos, where Muslim and Christian communities live peacefully side by side. There is even a practice of ‘Chrislam’, which is a merging of both Christian and Muslim practices, and many Yoruba families have both Muslim and Christian members of their family.
It’s fundamentally un-Yoruba of her to categorise Islam as a dangerous religion, so it’s bizarre of her to hold this viewpoint. Furthermore, the north of Nigeria is certainly majority Muslim, but is home to many ethnicities, all with distinct cultures and histories.
Genuinely national leaders don’t hold sectarian views
Kemi is well aware of this, so it makes little sense to refer to northern Nigeria as a monolith.
As for Boko Haram, they were largely defeated by the Nigerian military in 2015. Of course attacks still happen, but largely limited, so this is a very dated assessment of the north and speaks to her lack of real knowledge about contemporary Nigeria. Furthermore, “ethnic enemies” reeks of xenophobia, in a way that should be worrying to hear from an aspiring political leader of any nation.
How can somebody with these viewpoints be expected to ease tensions between Ireland and Northern Ireland, for example, or even Scotland and England? Most nations now are multi-ethnic, with histories of war or colonisation playing a part in how they co-exist today; somebody who seeks to deepen these divides rather than bridging them, by using terms such as ‘“ethnic enemies”, cannot be trusted to herald in a more peaceful future.
At a time where geopolitical tensions are at an all-time high across the world, we don’t need more leaders who are lackadaisical and lazy in their communication and understanding. Not only does it contribute to higher risk of violence across many communities, it also acts as a smoke screen or distraction from actually keeping political leaders accountable.
The problem of Nigeria’s diaspora
In conclusion, Kemi is simply a manifestation of a wider problem amongst the global Nigerian diaspora. While we are often lauded for our ambition and ability to be socially mobile outside of Nigeria, there is often a massive disconnect between diaspora communities and the reality of Nigeria today.
Whether it’s inheriting dated colonialist ideas or internalised racism as a minority in a foreign nation, the result tends to manifest in the viewpoints that Kemi espouses. Unfortunately, for many aspiring politicians in Britain from immigrant backgrounds, the price for social mobility is justifying Britain’s dark history of colonisation.
The role of diaspora communities should be to act as bridging differences, not deepening them. It’s important that we keep people like Kemi accountable, by continuing to educate and engage her with critical and constructive open conversation.
Written By Obsidian Adebayo
