Kemi is bad enough, By Majeed Dahiru

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Kemi Badenoch is a British citizen and patriot who is openly appreciative of Britain, her country, having experienced Nigeria in the past. She embodies the new spirit of British Conservative values, just as she is passionate about conserving the best of Great Britain and her fellow country folk trust her enough to position her to being the first black British Prime Minister. Her Nigerian traducers will not be able to derail her because Kemi is “bad enough” to stand up to them…

Kemi Badenoch, the British politician and leader of the Conservative Party of UK, has a lot of problems with Nigeria or so it seems, as seen in her often critical comments about the country. Kemi, a British citizen of Yoruba heritage, who spent some time living in Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s, during a period of the trials and tribulations experienced by citizens in the hands of corrupt military dictatorship, often depicts the country of her ancestors as everything a normal country should not be. According to Kemi, Great Britain is her country and she doesn’t “want it to become like a place I ran away from.” Adding that, ” I grew up in Nigeria, and I saw first-hand what happens when politicians are in it for themselves, when they use public money as their private piggy banks, when they pollute the whole political atmosphere with their failure to serve others.”

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Also, “I saw what socialism is for millions. I saw poverty and broken dreams. I came to Britain to make my way in a country where hard work and honest endeavour can take you anywhere. You cannot understand it unless you have lived it. Triple checking that all doors and windows are locked, waking up in the night at every sound, listening as you hear your neighbours scream as they are being burgled and beaten, wondering if your home is next.”

The leader of the British Conservative Party has had so much more to talk about her nightmarish experience in Nigeria. But her position on Nigeria can be summed up into how a corrupt political leadership has reduced the giant of Africa into a waddling dwarf that is pauperised, traumatised and terrorised on all fronts.

Interestingly, some leading members of Nigeria’s intellectual community and influential media personalities, who have dedicated their entire adult lives in writing and speaking against the ills of the Nigerian system she often talks about, have turned their pens and voices against Kemi in the most adversarial manner, accusing her of denigrating Nigeria as a short cut up the heights of British politics. For speaking the truth of her reality, as a British resident of Nigeria during the darkest ages of brutal and corrupt military dictatorship, whose guns those maligning her deployed their pens to defeat, Kemi has become the object of ridicule and hate in certain quarters.

…Vice President Shettima’s admonition to Badenoch to remove the “Kemi” in her name if she is not proud of her Nigerian heritage, is an unfortunate statement, just as the applause it received from the adversarial section of Nigeria’s intellectual community is a reminder of the democratic citizenship miseducation that is widespread in Nigeria, even among the highly educated and highly placed.

The on-going spat between some concerned members of Nigeria’s intellectual community (home and abroad) and Kemi Badenoch, over her often critical comments about Nigeria, assumed a diplomatic dimension when Nigeria’s vice president, Kashim Shettima made his rather unexpected intervention. While stating that “we are proud of her in spite of her effort to denigrate her country of origin,” Shettima said “she is entitled to her own opinions; she has even every right to remove Kemi from her name but that does not underscore the fact that greatest black nation on earth is the nation called Nigeria.” And with the vice president weighing in on the side of her traducers, Kemi has become a person of national interest to the Nigerian government.

However, Vice President Shettima’s admonition to Badenoch to remove the “Kemi” in her name if she is not proud of her Nigerian heritage, is an unfortunate statement, just as the applause it received from the adversarial section of Nigeria’s intellectual community is a reminder of the democratic citizenship miseducation that is widespread in Nigeria, even among the highly educated and highly placed. And the bemused reaction from the same quarter to Kemi’s response to the effect that she is “Yoruba and British not Nigerian” reveals the depth of democratic citizenship “illiteracy” among Nigeria’s otherwise sophisticated intellectual class, that is supposed to be the light of the nation of Nigeria.

Thanks to the high level of integration and seamless assimilation in the British society (something that is lacking in Nigeria), it has become perfectly possible to be Yoruba and not be Nigerian but British. It is called democratic citizenship.

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To ask an individual to drop her Yoruba name (Kemi) as a sign of her rejection of her Nigerian ancestry, is to suggest that to be Yoruba must necessarily translate to being Nigerian. To many Nigerian nativist intellectuals, being Yoruba and British is impossible in the same way a White supremacist considers being Yoruba and British incompatible. Otherwise if her Nigerian traducers had understood Kemi Badenoch to be as British as any other Euro-White citizen of United Kingdom, they would not have judged her assessment of Nigeria through a different criteria from David Cameron, who similarly described Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” a country. And it is this same nativist mentality that has prevented Nigeria from evolving into the Kashim Shettima’s “greatest black nation” where it is possible to be Yoruba and Kano, Hausa and Anambra, Igbo and Lagos, Kanuri and Bayelsa, Ijaw and Borno, etc.

The Afrobeat legend and great Pan-Africanist rose to global fame singing about the issues Kemi experienced while living in Nigeria, yet nobody accused him of denigrating Nigeria for speaking the truth. Some sections of the Nigerian media that has made it their pastime to chew on Kemi’s personality have been reporting and analysing Kemi’s truth about Nigeria since forever.

Like every other British citizen and institution, Kemi Badenoch has a right to her opinion on Nigeria without her personality and ethnic heritage coming under attack. At best Vice President Kashim Shettima could have aimed a shot at the flaws in her country’s (Britain) system and pointed out cases of corruption, embezzlement of public funds by Kemi and other British politicians, their broken healthcare system, millions of out-of-school-children, Boko Haram insurgency, banditry and sea piracy to her. There is nothing Kemi has said about Nigeria that is not the reality of Africa’s most populous country.

The Afrobeat legend and great Pan-Africanist rose to global fame singing about the issues Kemi experienced while living in Nigeria, yet nobody accused him of denigrating Nigeria for speaking the truth. Some sections of the Nigerian media that has made it their pastime to chew on Kemi’s personality have been reporting and analysing Kemi’s truth about Nigeria since forever. And most importantly, Vice President Kashim Shettima who once lamented that Boko Haram insurgents are better armed than Nigerian security forces supported his APC party to defeat the erstwhile ruling PDP on three key camping promises of tackling “insecurity, corruption and economic woes.” The campaign that brought the APC to power and which made it possible for Kashim Shettima to be Nigeria’s vice president today was firmly hinged on Kemi’s truth about Nigeria.

Kemi Badenoch is a British citizen and patriot who is openly appreciative of Britain, her country, having experienced Nigeria in the past. She embodies the new spirit of British Conservative values, just as she is passionate about conserving the best of Great Britain and her fellow country folk trust her enough to position her to being the first black British Prime Minister. Her Nigerian traducers will not be able to derail her because Kemi is “bad enough” to stand up to them as seen in the way she redirected Vice President Kashim Shettima’s attention to the problem of Islamism and Boko Haram in his native region of Northern Nigeria.

Majeed Dahiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja and can be reached through [email protected].