Nigerians are fans of Donald Trump. A 2019 survey showed that 58 percent of Nigerian adults had confidence in Trump to “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” compared with a median of 29 percent across 32 nations. This is even though Donald Trump is anti-immigrant, anti-black, and Islamophobic. Meanwhile, Nigerians are one of the largest immigrant populations in the US, Nigeria is the most populated African country, and Muslims make up half of the country’s population. Some have credited this support for Trump’s strongman appeal to the deeply patriarchal and authoritarian culture of Nigerian society, but the recent election of a Nigerian woman, Kemi Badenoch, as the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party has complicated this claim and raised more questions. Kemi Badenoch, who was a beneficiary of both softer immigration policies and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, rages against these same policies, which has made many ask whether Nigeria is exporting conservatism. But that question oversimplifies the issue at hand, especially given the recent unsolicited disclaimers of Nigeria by Kemi Badenoch. 

Kemi Badenoch has made several statements about Nigeria, generally describing Nigeria as a country plagued by corruption, insecurity, and dysfunction. Born Olukemi Adegoke to Nigerian parents, Kemi was raised in Lagos and the US before moving to the UK at 16. She has sharply criticized Nigeria, calling it a place where “fear was everywhere” and “almost everything seemed broken.” These remarks have elicited strong reactions from Nigerian officials like Vice President Kashim Shettima, who condemned Badenoch for denigrating her nation of origin. Badenoch stood by her comments, stating through a spokesperson that she is not Nigeria’s public relations representative and that she tells the truth as she sees it. She emphasized her pride in her role as the UK’s opposition leader and went on a divisive and generalizing tirade: “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than the specific ethnicity [Yoruba] … I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, Boko Haram, where Islamism is. Being Yoruba is my true identity, and I refuse to be lumped with northern people of Nigeria, who were our ethnic enemies, all in the name of being called a Nigerian.” She then went on further to swear her allegiance to the Crown: “Somebody once told me when I was very young that my surname [Adegoke] was a name for people who were warriors. They protected the crown, which I see myself as doing. I am here to protect, and I will die protecting this country because I know what’s out there.”

Before unpacking all of the contradictions in Kemi Badenoch’s Trumpesque description of Nigeria as a “shithole country,” one has to address those representatives of the Nigerian government who have dismissed Kemi’s criticisms as unpatriotic and unjustified. For the sake of the rest of us, it must be said that criticizing a society plagued by corruption, insecurity, and inefficiency is not an act of betrayal; it is, at best, a demand for accountability. This must be said within the context of an administration that has recently arrested critics and peaceful protesters during the #EndBadGovernance protests and has put them on trial for treason. Criticism is not treasonous. A patriot seeks the truth to drive progress, rather than cloak failures in false pride, as apologists of the Bola Tinubu regime do. Those directly responsible for the failure of governance in Nigeria, like Tinubu and Shettima, are the unpatriotic ones. Despite the generalizations in Badenoch’s opinions about Nigeria, her opinions about the climate of fear and police brutality in Nigeria are not misguided, and resonate with the realities of many Nigerians. This defensive nationalism and denialism of Nigerian government representatives rely mostly on emotional appeals to heritage and identity with the goal of stifling criticism instead of engaging it in the direction of finding meaningful solutions. It is myopic and complacent, and those who parrot it are useful idiots for Nigeria’s mediocre political class. 

Still, Kemi Badenoch’s opportunistic criticism is of a similar order to Nigerian officials’ opportunistic defensiveness. Her vilifying defeatism about Nigeria is far from genuine when one considers the fact she is building a political career in a country that has its legacy of direct exploitation of Nigeria through colonialism and neocolonialism. Given that she is in a place where she is politically and economically detached from the lived experiences of the majority of Nigerians at home and abroad, her criticism cannot be perceived as the genuine frustration of a diasporan Nigerian who wants to see meaningful reforms in her home country but can be perceived only as a condescending and dismissive erasure and an abdication of her duty of solidarity with those of us working for change and reforms within Nigeria. There have been zero attempts in Badenoch’s speeches since she became the leader of the UK’s Conservative Party to recognize the successes made by progressive forces within Nigeria. Any criticism with genuine intentions will not alienate those working for change in Nigeria and even those in the diaspora. She has refused to acknowledge the efforts of even Nigerians in the UK who formed part of the Nigeria Solidarity UK, who organized solidarity protests when the #EndBadGovernance protests were going on at home in August 2024. There is no nuance in her attempt to tell her truth as she sees it. Yet reality is nuanced, and a lack of nuance creates a one-sided narrative produced from simplistic binary thinking. 

Kemi Badenoch is only repeating the neocolonial stereotypes and generalizations that paint an incomplete and misleading picture of Nigeria. As if it is the Tory party line on Nigeria, another UK Conservative leader and then prime minister, David Cameron, once described Nigeria as “fantastically corrupt.” These narratives refuse to take into account the fact that British colonial administrators, who were prioritizing control and extraction of resources over development, had structured corruption, bribery, nepotism, and embezzlement into the fabric of Nigerian politics just so that they could keep our economy vulnerable with weak institutions, ethnic tensions, and economic dependency for further neocolonial exploitation after independence. The attempt by Kemi to stoke ethnic differences by referring to northern Nigeria as “ethnic enemies” of the Yoruba people is not only part of this neocolonial narrative, but also a very risky play for those of us Yorubas who reside in the northern part of Nigeria and who face the resultant violence when ruling-class game-players like Kemi stoke ethnic violence. This is the context in which Kemi Badenoch’s opportunistic criticism can be understood. 

These neocolonial stereotypes about corruption always forget to classify the exploitative trade agreements of global financial institutions with Nigeria as corruption. Earlier in 2024, as Nigerians were groaning under the neoliberal austerity of the Tinubu administration, while she was business and trade secretary under Rishi Sunak’s government, Badenoch oversaw the signing of the Enhanced Trade and Investment Partnership (ETIP), the first of its kind signed with an African country. Aiming to strengthen bilateral trade relations, it targets sectors such as law, financial services, and energy. The agreement has faced resistance from the legal sector since it allows British lawyers to practice Nigerian law. For this reason, then president of the Nigerian Bar Association, Yakubu Maikyau, called it “a tragic reminder of our colonial past” and noted that “we are not yet at a place for such agreement, and that even if we are to enjoy reciprocity with the UK (which is not an acceptable position), the knowledge and skills gap is so wide that we cannot favorably compete with lawyers from the UK.” In contrast to her current claims that everything is broken in Nigeria, Badenoch said at the time of signing the deal, “Nigeria has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. UK businesses have already seen huge success here, and I look forward to seeing how we continue to grow this relationship.”

These neocolonial narratives about corruption forget to count illicit financial flows facilitated by  Nigerian politicians into the British economy. A 2021 report linked just 10 former Nigerian governors to properties worth £56 million (about ₦30 billion) in the United Kingdom. They forget to classify the tax evasion of their multinational corporations in Nigeria as corruption. Between 2007 and 2017, Nigeria lost $178 billion (about ₦5.4 trillion, an equivalent of 2024 fuel subsidy savings that was used to justify the hardship that came from the exponential increment of fuel price) to tax evasion by multinationals. They rush to portray corruption as an internal failing of the Nigerian Nation and absolve their global system of any complicity.

While it is now clear that Kemi Badenoch is a committed member of the colonial apologist class, whose personal advancement is their primary allegiance over any need for a constructive change, it is necessary to see how conservative politics in the UK, the US, and other parts of the Global North have refused to acknowledge the dark sides of colonial history. Conservatives would rather engage in identity politics to switch the face of conservatism from white male to white female (in the case of Theresa May and Elizabeth Truss) or immigrant male (in the case of Rishi Sunak), or immigrant female (in the case of Kemi Badenoch). This pattern is not accidental, as it was reported that Cameron’s liberal conservatism deliberately recruited parliamentary candidates who were female and not white. It is the calculated strategy to gain favor in this kind of environment that has made Kemi Badenoch go on this current rampage about Nigeria in a desperate attempt to prove that she is fully assimilated into the United Kingdom and has nothing of Nigeria in her. This calculated strategy is what enhances internalized racism in some Nigerians in the diaspora who hold on to their social conservatism even in societies that are arguably more liberal. While other Nigerians in the diaspora are participating in advocacy and solidarity movements for change in Nigeria, some Nigerians who no longer want to share in the responsibility of making this country a better place are throwing their families back home under the bus just so they can prove their loyalty to the Master. 

Although we have Nigerians like Omoyele Sowore and Chidi Odinkalu making important political contributions from the diaspora, the reason why we have a lot of Nigerians abroad who are conservative is that most people who leave Nigeria do not do so to explore the world and expand their imaginative horizons, but leave desperately to escape an open-air prison. This is why the “Japa” phenomenon is more typical to Nigeria, and according to surveys by the African Polling Institute in 2019 and 2022, the percentage of Nigerians who would relocate out of the country with their families if they had the chance jumped from 39 percent to 69 percent in three years. In the situation where escaping is the main motivation of Nigerian immigrants, it is very understandable that those who eventually break free from Nigeria are much more focused on personal advancement than on the collective liberation of the Nigerian people. Given that conservatism favors personal advancement over collective interests, social conservatism becomes a natural ideological habitat for most Nigerians in the diaspora. This is the ideological base of the unproductive neocolonial narrative of superiority that Badenoch now represents, and this is how one can understand the rise and renunciations of Kemi Badenoch.