Bad, Bad Badenoch….

 By Obi Nwakanma

Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the British Conservative Party was born to Nigerian parents with Yoruba ancestry. Her father, the now late Dr. Femi Adegoke was a Medical doctor and Yoruba Nationalist activist in Lagos, and her mother, Feyi Adegoke was a Professor of Physiology at the University of Lagos. 

*Badenoch

Kemi was born in January 1980, according those who know her family well, in a London hospital. This, only because her mother had complications with her pregnancy, and had to be delivered of her baby under specialist care in a small Wembley Hospital. I doubt this very much. In 1980, Nigeria had very distinguished, world class neonatal specialists at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). Medical Services were still relatively decent.

So I think, the truth about Kemi’s birth in London might be a little different, and a bit less complicated. In the 1970s and 1980s, Nigerians could still afford to travel and pay their medical bills out of pocket. I mean, the Naira was just two to the pound, and with 75 kobo you could get the dollar. The Nigerian Airways flew regularly to Heathrow, and middle class Nigerians, like Kemi’s parents, had begun to think it de riguer, something to show-off with, to have their children born in a London Hospital, which automatically registered them as British citizens.

It was an arriviste impulsion, like that Lagos socialite that I once knew, who celebrated his first million pounds from a government contract, by washing his hands with a Baron Rotchild’s Champagne, inside a large crystal bowl. There was really no big  deal to it. Nigerians did not need a British passport, under the old Commonwealth agreements, to travel to the UK. 

They could just travel with their Nigerian passport, and be allowed into the United Kingdom. All that of course, changed in 1987, when Kemi Badenoch was already seven years. But roll back to 1980: Nigeria was still in that period of high elation. It was the height of the global oil boom. Ms. Badenoch had been only three months when the second republic was inaugurated, and Shehu Aliyu Shagari was sworn in as president. The mood in 1980 was still high octane partying. 

The cultural environment mirrored the economic possibilities. The music was heady. Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall,” was still bursting the charts. Then in Nigeria, one early morning that 1980, Kris Okotie came with that melodic paean, “I need Someone.” Then Jide Obi’s “Front Page News.” These were kids in the Law School of the University of Nigeria. They kept us dancing. I learnt to drive. The world in 1980 Nigeria, for a middle class family, with a new baby, was full of possibilities. Then the world began to change. By 1981, the oil boom went burst.

By 1982, the Shagari government introduced the austerity measures. Middle income folks began to take a second, more studied look at the grocery list. Still, it was not all that bad. Just nervous. There was still hope that the Federal government would reset, and  refocus with the coming elections of 1983, which was hard fought and disappointing. There were accusations and counter accusations of massive rigging. Omoboriowo was run out of time by a mob that dared him to return to Ondo. Nigeria had entered a dark place in 1983. Kemi Badenoch was only three years, and would certainly not remember the emerging drama of that period. 

The 1983 election marked the permanent retirement of the old politicians who negotiated, and crafted the foundational documents of the Nigerian nation, and its independence. The 77 years old war horse, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the leader of the anticolonial nationalist movement, feeling cheated of an election victory, which many analysts felt he won, threw up his hands in the air in resignation, and crafted his Nunc dimitis in a huff, with that angry retort, “history will vindicate the just.” He went dark, thereafter.  

Obafemi Awolowo, leader of the Yoruba, and a great political force of the 20th century in Nigeria, also went into quiet, political seclusion. Aminu Kano, the fiery teacher and advocate of the Talakawa had died earlier that year. The fallouts of the 1983 election were still in the air, when the military struck on that harmattan-crested morning of December 31, 1983, the last day of the year, which ushered in the new year with a coup led by  Muhammadu Buhari. 

The snarly voices we heard were Sani Abacha and Joshua Dogonyaro. But the wraith that emerged after all was said and done was Muhammadu Buhari, and a stern faced Tunde Idiagbon. Lurking by the corner was the gap-toothed fox, Ibrahim Babangida. The soldiers came with a laundry list of grievances, and promises. Nothing was the same for Nigeria after December 31, 1983. 

The nation’s steady decline, downhill, commenced. It has been progressive. Each year bred the worst. This was the Nigeria that Kemi Badenoch came to know. The Nigeria of incremental pain. Fear. Despair. Terror. Unemployment. Assassinations. Letter bombs. Debt. Disappearances. Corruption. 

By the time she turned ten in 1990, she must have been thrust unto a national gallery of events, that made her feel unsafe, and traumatized. There was the radical impoverishment of the middle class. Folks like her parents, may not have been worse off, speaking in general terms, but they too had been forced to cut back on stuff they took for granted, only a decade before. Nigeria had entered a dark tunnel of history. 

By the time sixteen years old Kemi was sent off to school in the UK in 1996, she most certainly had made up her mind: Nigeria was despicable. It gave few opportunities. It did not nurture its youth. It is a hard and desperate place to live. If you have lived in much saner places where things work, Nigeria is a cruel joke. It is actually worse than a pit latrine. And it has got worse since Buhari and Tinubu arrived, in the last ten years. 

If Nigeria was a pit of vipers by 1996 when Kemi Badenoch left Nigeria, today, particularly since the arrival of Muhammadu Buhari, Bola Tinubu and the goons of the APC, Nigeria has become hell on earth. There is no point sugar coating. If there is going to be hell in the afterlife, Nigerians are already prepared for it in this life. Hell is not going to be much different from living in Nigeria today under Tinubu. 

So, three weeks ago, Kemi Badenoch, this child discarded by Nigeria, who would probably not have had any serious prospects in Nigeria, had she remained, was elected to lead the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom. She became the leader of opposition in the Parliament, following the Conservative Party’s loss and Labour’s victory. She may, if she keeps it together, a task that is proving more herculean than she imagined, become the next Prime Minister of Britain. This is a remarkable feat. I do not like her conservative politics, and clearly her self-hating ideas and pronouncements are deeply troubling, and problematic. 

But Kemi Badenoch’s rise to Britian’s high political echelon says something of her grit and determination. Her tough Nigerian upbringing. Never mind that she has to throw her own kind under the bus, to arrive at this destination. She is now a ventriloquist for empire, and for the egregious racism, rapine, and exploitations of British conservatism. Well, out here in Nigeria, she was approached. A full set of drums were to be rolled out to celebrate this Nigerian woman who might be Prime Minister of Britian.

The first Black woman to lead the Conservative Party of Great Britain. So far, Kemi Badenoch has shunned Nigeria, and the Nigerian leadership. She has said hurtful things about Nigeria that has roiled the likes of Femi Fani-Kayode, one of the political lepers with whom Ms. Badenoch does not wish to be associated. Yes, indeed. 

The situation of Nigeria was compounded by the fact that unprincipled and corrupt men, and irrational ethnic bigots like Fani-Kayode, were allowed the opportunity to lead in Nigeria. His likes have royally messed Nigeria, left, right and center, and should have no moral right to disparage Kemi Badenoch.

Yet, I feel in slight agreement with him that Ms. Badenoch’s shunning of Nigeria, and her public disavowal of her Nigerianness, is graceless and shortsighted. Even ungrateful. It is bad, Ms. Badenoch. It is very bad. Kemi Badenoch may have been born in the UK, but she was bred in Nigeria; on her streets as well as in the bourgeois circles of middle class Lagos. She was afforded a life in Nigeria that most Nigerian kids never had. 

She was sent to good schools, was fed, housed, and prepared for her successes in the UK, all with resources from Nigeria. She needs to be grateful, and she needs to acknowledge that. But Ms. Badenoch’s politics may also have roots in her father’s politics. The late Dr. Femi Adegoke was an ethnic nationalist activist, who grew to despise Nigeria and what it had become.

His daughter, spawned from that same spirit, is not only deeply offended by Nigeria, she too despises Nigeria. Nigerian means nothing to her. No, let me roll that back a bit: for Kemi Badenoch, Nigeria means a bad dream. An existential threat. A demonic space. Nigerians must come to terms with that, and with the fact that she has made her choice. She is no longer a Nigerian. She is now, the potential leader of Great Britain. 

Faced with a choice between Nigeria and Britain, she will throw Nigeria to the jackals. Why? Because Nigeria broke her heart and her spirit. Britain picked her up and restored her. She is now their bitch.

*Nwakanma is a US-based Professor of English and Literary Studies