Kemi Badenoch, leader of the UK Conservative Party, says she no longer identifies as a Nigerian, a few months after she described her ancestral home as a country where the government “destroys lives.”
The Conservative party leader, who was born in London, but grew up in Nigeria and the US and did not return to the UK until she was 16, said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades.
Speaking to the Rosebud podcast, Badenoch said: “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really. I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I’m very interested in what happens there.
“But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family, my extended family, I call it.”
In 1980 Badenoch was among the last people to automatically receive British citizenship because she was born in the UK. Margaret Thatcher abolished birthright citizenship the following year.
“Finding out that I did have that British citizenship was a marvel to so many of my contemporaries, so many of my peers,” she said.
Additionally, she emphasized: “I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]… I have nothing in common with northern Nigeria—the Boko Haram, the Islamism.”
“I think the reason that I came back here [the UK] was actually a very sad one, and it was that my parents thought: ‘There is no future for you in this country.’” She recalled “never quite feeling that I belonged there”.
The future Tory leader moved back to the UK aged 16 to live with a friend of her mother because of the worsening political and economic situation in Nigeria, and to study for her A-levels.
When Badenoch’s father, Femi Adegoke, who was a doctor, died in Nigeria in 2022 she obtained a visa to travel there, which she described as a “big fandango”.
Reactions in Nigeria
Vice President Kashim Shettima, who hails from northern Nigeria, sharply rebuked her comments. He suggested she might as well “drop the ‘Kemi’ from her name” if she does not take pride in Nigeria.
Abike Dabiri-Erewa, head of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission, noted that her office reached out multiple times, but the Conservative leader did not respond. “We don’t force someone to accept being Nigerian,” she said.
