British Kemi Badenoch raises controversy by recounting her Nigerian origins | policy

British Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch returned to the forefront of controversy after her statements on a British radio program, in which she said that she was “Nigerian by roots, but by identity I am not.”

This phrase once again sparked widespread debate about its relationship to its African roots and its political image in Britain.

Since assuming the leadership of the Conservatives in 2024, Badenoch has been keen to present herself as a product of the British regime, which she considers her “savior,” as opposed to portraying Nigeria as a chaotic and corrupt country.

But in Lagos, where her last name, Adegoke, is still popular, her story seems less convincing.

According to testimonies reported by the Africa Report website, her family lived a comfortable life. Her father was a doctor who ran a private clinic, and her mother was a lecturer at the University of Lagos.

One of the family’s former neighbors says, “Her depiction of poverty does not resemble what the majority of Nigerians experience,” stressing that the Adegoke family was “the elite of the neighborhood.”

The report also indicates that the family was able to travel to Britain to receive treatment, and that Kimmy’s birth in London in 1980 automatically granted her British citizenship, which many considered a strategic privilege from which the family benefited.

Political paradox

The irony, as the Africa Report explains, is that Badenoch, who benefited from flexible immigration policies in the 1970s and 1980s, has today become one of the most prominent advocates of tightening immigration laws, proposing to raise the residency requirement to obtain citizenship from 6 years to 15 years.

Badenock says that the collapse of the Nigerian economy in the 1990s turned her family’s situation upside down, and that her move to Britain at the age of 16 shaped her conservative political awareness.

However, according to the testimonies of relatives reported by the website, she exaggerates her portrayal of her suffering and selects from her memory what serves her speech to the British public.

One of her relatives believes that “her social conservatism was influenced by her father, while her political conservatism is more linked to her desire to please a white British public looking for an individual success story.”

However, Badenock often describes Nigeria as a country of “fear and failure,” even likening her high school to a “prison.”

But her former schoolmates considered this description exaggerated, stressing that what she experienced was nothing but “normal teenage discipline.”

The Africa Report concludes that Badenoch’s account of her childhood is not just a personal recollection, but rather a political tool through which she reformulates her identity to suit the conservative mood in post-Brexit Britain, where her story of “surviving the chaos of… Africa“It resonated widely with its audience.