I had not been particularly interested in the election, last month, of Ms Kemi Badenoch as the Leader of the Conservative party, Leader of the Opposition in the British parliament and a potential Prime Minister. And until last week, I had not been much interested in what she says or not either.
There is a reason. During her first, and ultimately unsuccessful bid for party leadership in 2022, I had watched Badenoch speak briefly once, and knew instantly what she isn’t. She is no Barack Obama, no Rishi Sunak, and no Sadiq Khan. All three were, in their own different contexts, the first non-white persons to be elected the nominee of a major US political party and President (Obama), Tory party leader and UK Prime Minister (Sunak), and London Mayor (Khan) respectively. But this is not what sets them apart from Badenock who now as Tory party leader, can also lay claim to the growing fad of a “historic first person” of various colours to break yet another racial glass ceiling in Western politics
What sets those three apart from Badenock is perhaps the most important thing in this often-ugly political business of racial minority politicians crashing in at the gates of Western politics, namely, self-presentation. Obama, Sunak and Khan accept who they are as racial minorities in white-dominated society, and then project themselves to be seen as just as good as anyone else within its politics, if not better.
Badenoch, on the other hand, has been personally conflicted about her personhood; her identity as a British woman of Nigerian/African ancestry who lived here until age 16. In that respect, she is more like Vice President Kamala Harris who cannot say whether she is a black or Indian woman, even though she knows, as everyone else does, that in the context of US politics and society, she is simply black.
That makes Kemi Badenoch a copy of a copy, a fake of a fake, twice removed from the original, to paraphrase what Plato thought of all art. Sunak’s minority status in Britain, for example, is double, by being both Indian and black, as is Khan’s, for being both Indian and Muslim. Yet, both have managed to almost never talk about their race, religion or ancestry. Instead, they have presented themselves mainly as British, without feeling the need to contrast their ancestral home to the country of their birth. They speak mostly of their experiences, and what they had achieved on the way to the top against all odds as racial minorities in a British society that was, and still is, paradoxically welcoming of difference and yet so systemically intolerant of it.
For being both a woman and black, Badenoch shares this double minority identities too. But rather than marshal them more positively as a capable woman unencumbered by her ancestry or past to appeal to a conservative but still a multi-cultural audience, she chose instead the impossible task of trying to peel off her Nigerian-ness from her skin. This is the core Badenoch problem: her inability to settle the question of her identity, the question of who she is, even within herself.
This is why the British media are constantly, and deliberately, haranguing her with questions about migration, reparations for slavery and colonialism, and the like, as if these are the only topics she is good enough to speak about. This is why the rest of us Nigerians and other Africans who rightly feel outraged by her constant berating of life in Lagos, the Nigeria police, or what it means to be a Nigerian or African altogether, should look to her with a bit of empathy. What she says about Nigeria reflects more her own insecurities about herself. And of course, her British audiences know this only too well.
As the Guardian columnist and satirist, John Crace, who first rechristened her “KemiKaze,” has described her in recent pieces, in Badenoch, there is, “beneath the surface” of that superficial image of a straight-talking strong woman, “a vulnerability that she despises. It’s why she lashes out so readily. The person she dislikes the most is herself” and that “her fatal flaw is to imagine that she knows best”. This is how she is described, for good reason, in her adopted country, the very one she speaks so glowingly about.
Rather than find something positive to say about Nigeria, for the sake of balance and fair comment at least, she instead constantly denigrates her country of origin as being the source of the worst in her, and Britain, as being the best of it. At the Conservative Party conference earlier this year, she talked about the fear of crime everyone in the neighbourhood felt when she was growing up as a teenager in Lagos, just to make her Tory audience feel good about themselves, conveniently forgetting that at the same time in the 1980s and 1990s, people in parts of London, Birmingham, Manchester and elsewhere in Britain knew that fear only too well. After all, an average of 3.5 million crimes, from burglaries to murders, were committed in England and Wales alone, between 1980 and 1992.
But last week, she went truly KemiKaze in her denial of the self. “I find it interesting that everyone defines me as a Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with my specific ethnic group. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram, where Islamism is. Being Yoruba is my true identity and I refuse to be lumped with the northern people of Nigeria, who were our ethnic enemies, all in the name of being called a Nigerian,” she told the Spectator.
If this sounds like the ignorant rant of a teenager bred on binary divisions, hate and ethnic irredentism, it sure is. We must thank the Punch newspaper for reporting about how Badenoch had leveraged her Nigerian identity for votes early in her career, only to now deny it, an indication of how she has changed as her ambitions and audiences grew larger. The irony is of course entirely on her because trust me, the very audiences she dances naked in the public square for, know the political drill only too well. It will not make them accept her more, nor make them dislike her less.
Secondly, she may not know it, but the idea of a “Yoruba” ethnic identity is an entirely Nigerian thing. It does not and cannot exist outside of the context of Nigerian social and political history. There are Yoruba-speaking peoples in Togo and Benin. Yet, no one thinks of them as Yoruba beyond simply being Togolese and Béninois. Not all African countries are caught up permanently and narcissistically in the sort of wrangling about ethnic difference, rather than a celebration of our common African ancestry, to the extent we do here. In a word, then, Badenoch reflects no more than the poverty of Nigerian public education, although you would expect the leader of the Tory party, heiress to Thatcher, Churchill and Disraeli, to be at least a bit better educated. But here we are with her.
All of which brings us to the final point. Badenoch is free to think so highly of herself right now, and I will not begrudge her for her small comforts in a rather harsh political environment. But she must know that her rise is a direct result of the fall of a once-great party, not due to any rare talent or ability she possesses. Like the past few Tory leaders before her, she is but a signal to the end of an era for one of the world’s oldest and most successful political parties. Soon enough, she would be gone and forgotten.
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