She does not take prisoners. And it appears that she will not be pacified. She is neither a cowboy(girl) nor an American, but she can’t stop shooting straight from the hips. Somehow she manages to hit the bull’s-eye with each and every shot. She ruffles feathers everywhere including in the inner sanctum of Nigeria’s presidential villain, sorry, Villa. She has become a thorn, a nightmare, a nemesis, and a gadfly to today’s men of dubious and immoral power.
Our obviously idle vice president Mohammed Kashim Shettima, in an attempt to be heard and seen to be relevant tried to shut her up. He was promptly eviscerated, not by the woman on a mission of calling out Nigeria’s misguided rulers but by her low ranking aide. The message in the choice of who responded to our vice president’s silly attack on a major party leader in a country supposedly in the first world was telling. The woman was simply saying that Shettima was so down the pecking order that she could not bring herself to respond to his foolish reaction to her earlier comments about Nigeria, its police force and sundry matters about a country in rapid and inexorable decline.
Kemi Badenoch is a Nigerian. She is also British. She is currently the leader of the loyal opposition party, the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom (UK). She is a breath away from being the prime minister of the country that colonised Nigeria for decades up till October 1, 1960. She is a politician, and so it can be difficult to divorce her person from her public comments and posturings. If you believe any politician it will only be at your own personal peril.
Many politicians here and everywhere in the world speak from both sides of their mouths. They are selfish. Everything they do, almost everything they do, is to the service of self. So if Kemi, the current loudest voice in the bashing of Nigeria, has suddenly become forceful in the condemnation of our country, of her country also, it’s essentially for the furtherance of her political career in her country of choice – Britain. She is speaking their language and her audience is enamoured with her. That could be the reason why she came, literally speaking, from nowhere to sit atop perhaps the oldest, and arguably until recently one of the most racist political parties in history. Kemi Badenoch may not be that useful idiot that some Nigerians want to make of her in her commitment to her party.
As we said earlier Kemi is a brilliant British politician. And she speaks and acts as one. Having spent almost all her adult life in the UK (she was born there but briefly sojourned in Nigeria before returning at 16), the timidity of undue deference to authority and elders appears to have worn out. For her there seems to be no more inhibition of culture shock. After all, a former British prime minister once told a former Nigerian president (who was old enough to be his father) to his face and in public that Nigeria is a “fantastically corrupt” country, and the Nigerian ruler agreed, also in public. All these happened in foreign land- in London. It’s obvious that when some foreign leaders, in or out of power, speak to our rulers or about our country, they are not mindful of diplomatese or circumspection.
Nigeria has become toast and the butt of jokes. That explains why our country would put out a statement announcing an agreement with an otherwise ordinary foreign government, and a nondescript agency of that other country would issue a disclaimer which would sound like a reprimand to Nigeria.
But we digress. Let’s return to what is turning out to be a series of Bad knocks by Ms Kemi Badenoch on Nigeria. Last week, precisely January 18, it was widely reported in the media at home and abroad that the leader of the Conservative Party gave her first major speech of the new year. She reportedly said, among other things, that she did not want Britain to be like Nigeria, a poor country where terrible governments destroy lives. She said her push for ‘real conservatism’ was to guarantee a ‘better, richer and safer’ tomorrow for the younger generation of Brits. “Why this matters so much to me is because I know what it is like to have something and lose it. I don’t want Britain to lose what it has.
I grew up in a poor country, and I watched my relatively wealthy family become poorer and poorer and poorer despite working harder as their money disappeared with inflation”. Badenoch recounted how she migrated to the UK at 16 with her father’s last £100 and a hope for a better life, and vowed she would never allow the UK to become a country like Nigeria. “I came back to the UK at 16 with my father’s last £100 and a hope for a better life. So, I’ve lived with the consequences of a terrible government that destroys lives, and never ever want that to happen here”.
This would be the second time in as many months that the Nigerian -British politician has called out this country and its rulers. Earlier in an interview with The Free Press, Badenoch had recounted an incident in which she claimed that officers of the Nigeria Police stole her brother’s wrist watch and shoes. She said that the incident and similar encounters had left her with a negative impression of the Nigerian Police, adding ruefully that giving the police a gun had become ‘just a licence to intimidate’ and to rob. Whenever Kemi spoke it was about the state of Nigeria.
However, it has become the practice of the extant regime and its supporters to feel slighted by her factual observations. Elements in the Nigeria police rob citizens at gunpoint. And this happens everyday. Police roadblocks are toll plazas and they litter the highways across the country. Some of the checkpoints are equipped with point of sales (POS) gadgets. There are many rogue police personnel just as there are very good and exceptional police operatives. As in other areas of life, the bad ones tar the rest with a dark brush.
Who wants to deny that we have not had a series of bad and terrible governments including this one headed by Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Kemi kept alluding to? If this country had not been afflicted with a succession of dim-witted and utterly corrupt rulers, there’s no way Nigeria will become and remain the poverty capital of the world since 2019; have hundreds of thousands of its citizens living in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps for decades in a country that’s not officially at war; record about 20 million out of school children; contend with over 50% of its more than 200 million in crushing poverty; suffer from severe energy deficit including having about 70% of its population outside the national electricity grid; and, suffer from the humiliation of non-state actors contesting the sovereignty of the country by occupying territories and imposing taxes and levies on hapless Nigerians.
The afflictions of Nigeria inflicted on it by her clueless and insensitive rulers are legion. It takes a patriot to speak to them and to call out the government. So Kemi Badenoch is an authentic patriot. She is different from the ‘patriots’ created at every turn by the men in power. This class of ‘patriots’ have a short shelf life- eight years at the most.
But if Kemi were to be Igbo it would have been a lot easier for the rest of Nigeria to label her and then take her on. And down. She would have been called a secessionist and a separatist agitator who is working with some foreign countries to dismember Nigeria. She would have been described as an ambassador of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its main fundraiser abroad. Letters would have been written to King Charles of Britain, the Conservative Party, the UK parliament, the United Nations (UN), and possibly the US Congress calling for the arrest of Kemi Badenoch who they would describe as a terrorist and a clear and present danger to global peace. If she were to be Igbo the Nigerian government would have claimed that she was plotting treason because her kinsman did not win the presidential election in 2023.
She would have been labelled as a gunrunner, a patron of the eastern security network (ESN), founder of the murderous unknown gunmen, and the inspiration for the diverse insecurity besetting the southeast states. It would have been claimed also that her activities were being funded by Mr. Peter Obi so as to discredit and destabilise and, ultimately to overthrow the federal government of Nigeria. If Kemi Badenoch were to be Igbo the rest of the country would have been united in a campaign to strip her of her Nigerian citizenship. The Igbo living in Nigeria but outside the Igbo homeland would have been going through hell.
They would have been visited with bodily harm, their landlords would have served them quit notices, their businesses would have been attacked and destroyed, and the markets where they are dominant would have been torched. Anything to decapitate and castrate the Igbo would have been fair game. And the host governments would look the other way. Well, Kemi Badenoch is Yoruba and British. And power is in the hands of a Yoruba with crumbs left for the Hausa, Fulani and Kanuri. With a Muslim – Muslim presidency they should know how to sort themselves out. The ‘pity us’ statement issued on Sunday by a presidential aide Daniel Bwala in response to the latest salvo from Kemi would only be good enough for the trash bin. The only worthy response would be for this regime to roll up its sleeves and begin the hard work to salvage this country. But do our current rulers have the capacity and the appetite and the disposition to do so?
