Kemi Badenoch: Beyond presidential jab

WITH glee last Tuesday, the Nigerian presidency attempted a savage public smackdown of United Kingdom’s second most powerful citizen and opposition leader, Kemi Badenoch for her perceived nescience of how birthright and citizenship work in Nigeria, despite the African country being her descent.

Presidential spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, mockingly asked the government of Keir Starmer to repatriate her to root despite being a full-throttled UK citizen, for tutorials on how Nigeria’s citizenship is required and acquired after she appeared to fumble the legal demands in an interview with CNN. Nigerian lawyers also weighed in, with leading legal voice Femi Falana issuing a disclaimer to her submission that her gender automatically robbed her supposedly dual-citizened children automatic official Nigerian identity.

Apparently frustrated, like countless others, by Badenoch unloading on Nigeria at nearly every opportunity, the Senior Advocate, writing under the headline “Kemi Badenoch’s misleading claim on Nigerian citizenship”, opened his disclaimer with “In her desparate attempt to impress the British electorate, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, keeps running down Nigeria”, before referencing her latest outing as “a display of utter ignorance of the law guiding Nigerian citizenship”.

The opposition leader said, while dissecting the vexed issue of immigration as a hot-button in UK politics, “There are many people who come to our country, to the UK, who do things that would not be acceptable in their countries. It’s virtually impossible, for example, to get Nigerian citizenship. I had that citizenship by virtue of my parents. I can’t give it to my children because I’m a woman. Yet loads of Nigerians come to the UK, stay for a relatively brief period of time, acquire British citizenship. We need to stop being naive.”

Trying to straighten her up, Falana responded with, “Contrary to Kemi Badenoch’s misleading claim, her children are Nigerians because she is a Nigerian. Her assertion that she cannot give Nigerian citizenship to her children because she is a woman is not in consonance with Section 25(b) and (c) of the Nigerian Constitution which provides that “every person born in Nigeria after the date of independence either of whose parents or any of whose grandparents is a citizen of Nigeria; and (c) every person born outside Nigeria either of whose parents is a citizen of Nigeria.”

“Furthernore, by virtue of Section 42(2) of the Nigerian Constitution, no citizen of Nigeria shall be subjected to any disability or deprivation merely by reason of the circumstances of his birth, gender, political opinion or class. To that extent, Kemi Badenoch’s children cannot be denied their Nigerian citizenship because of her gender.

“Therefore, like Kemi Badenoch, her two children are Nigerian citizens. The fact that the Tory leader may not want them to claim their Nigerian citizenship is totally irrelevant. For now, they are dual citizens of Britain and Nigeria. It is up to the children to renounce their Nigerian citizenship upon the attainment of full age in accordance with Section 29 of the Nigerian Constitution.

“Kemi Badenoch also said that “It’s virtually impossible, for example, to get Nigerian citizenship.” Her baseless claim cannot be justified under Sections 26 and 27 of the Nigerian Constitution which state that a foreigner is qualified to acquire the citizenship of Nigeria either by naturalisation or registration upon the fulfilment of certain conditions.

“No doubt, there are aspects of the Nigerian Constitution with respect to citizenship that require urgent amendment. For example, a woman who is married to a  Nigerian man is qualified for registration as a citizen. But the same right is not accorded to a man who is married to a Nigerian woman because of the patriarchal nature of the society.”

Unlike the presidency’s shallow mockery, I find Falana’s intervention more robust and rounded, sensible even if contentious and rebuking enough without a descent into disgust. The constitutionally foregrounded intervention from Falana is what should have emanated from the official quarters, either the Ministry of Interior, Foreign Affairs or even the State House, if it has a functional Legal Unit. But every issue, especially now that the politics of re-election is gripping everywhere, is likely to be viewed from the prism of politics, especially when the “foreign” attacker is a Nigerian cousin to someone viewed as a closet opposition, following the 2022 struggle for the presidential ticket. 

No doubt like Trump, Badenoch sees Nigeria as a shit-hole and the ruling elite as a ruinous lot. Even Falana viewed her sealed negative views of Nigeria as political punches to deliver votes to her Tory party on immigration, which may have some truth to it, but until what appears a gaffe, the Tory gaffer, as acerbic as she has been delivering her lines, hasn’t said anything new about Nigeria being made a cemetery of aspirations and perspirations by leaders who have consistently and continuously raped her. Even home-grown rights warriors like Falana have pointed and still pointing out the damage being done to the country by her leaders and most times, the domestic agitators for better life for the Nigerian masses, are largely ignored as ranting ants by successive governments. I guess the Nigerian government is always tackling back because of the global platform Kemi is using for her tirades as well as her status as someone just a heartbeat away from leading a global power, even if UK is no longer the super-power it used to be, and not because the issues she had raised in the past about misgovernace in Nigeria were untrue or that government is already doing something about fixing them. Kemi has made her choice; it is UK, which she fondly referred to as “our country” in the tendentious CNN interview, while referencing Nigeria, like a pesky bug. She might have also made the citizenship choice for her children even maybe the first was delivered of her. It also doesn’t seem she will let the past of how Nigeria badly happened to her and her family, go anytime soon and definitely not now that she has something close to the power of retribution, at least by constantly calling out the plague of undeniably streak of poor governing of Nigeria, especially in the last one decade. Tried as the Tinubu administration has, to cast her anti-Nigerians, Kemi’s railings and wailings have been about the trauma everyday Nigerian is forced to live through due to the selfishness, insensitivity, cluelessness and arrogance of the ruling class. What is love if not sharing both joy and sadness and while the former, which leadership by the righteous should elicit is now a rarity in the country, the latter, which policies of government, especially of the current administration, has brought about, is littering everywhere. So, what is wrong in a former “blood” sister trauma-bonding with those not as fortunate as her to have a better second address and a much-respected travel passport.

No doubt, Kemi would do well suppressing the barely-concealable deep-seated aversion that always seems to overwhelm her when discussing Nigeria and her childhood/teenage years before the London relocation, but her raging emotions should not detract from the virtues of her arguments, when factual and data-driven.

Even in the immigration matter, Falana still concurred that all isn’t well yet, pointing out the discriminating portion of the law that makes express citizenship-by-registration difficult for a male foreigner marrying a Nigerian lady. Yet, this marriage “arrangee” is one of the surest paths to citizenship in the UK, which has seen countless Nigerian male immigrants to UK become emergency polygamists, leaving wives and children back home, to start another family over there with British women, basically for citizenship. For most of the emergency couples, it’s mainly business, a contract which both parties must adhere to, to avoid jail terms. Even men who rigidly stood with marital fidelity in Nigeria but had to flee the economic hell to UK, have been caught in what I will call the “marriage mirage” and wholly supported by their legal wives back home. Any time tension tends to flare for some couples I know in the “white woman” arrangement, the winning question from the men usually is “do you want me to come back home?”. Not a single one of the wives I know has answered in the affirmative. A couple of them just give up with “e sa ma gbagbe wa sibi” (at least, don’t forget us here). A few bills of Pound Sterling, a few days after, would restore “normalcy” despite both parties knowing their marital foundation is already torn. The price of such instability is better not imagined especially on the children. The UK opposition leader might not get the legality of her argument right this time, but the social implications of Nigerians running away from Motherland, is staring everybody in the face here. Most of the delinquents I know in my Lagos hood, have either both or one of the parents abroad, mostly in UK, US and Canada. Forex is flowing but no one to mould the children. Those living with their mums, who are more like baby mamas despite being legally married, manifest the apparent lack of father figure in their lives. How can such societal dislocation make any service-minded leader happy? But political power in Nigeria is an affliction in the hands of the ruling elite, while they try to create a Goshen with the people’s commonwealth to shield themselves from the plagues of their misrule. But a thousand Sams can’t outrun God. If God has deliberately promoted Badenoch to the global pedestal to, among other things, constantly call out the motion-without-movement governance in Nigeria, so be it. Many have said UK would soon serve her racism breakfast and bring her to the reality of her skin colour. Maybe. But considering how far God has lifted her, making history as the first black, man or woman, her place in global history is already etched whether she leads the Tory back to power to become Prime Minister or more disastrous snap election defeats, force her off the opposition leadership. The good thing is that whenever she speaks, our god-like leaders listen and instead of presidential spokespersons trying to ridicule her perceived poor knowledge of citizenship laws in Nigeria, it would make better sense to engage with her diplomatically out of public view and definitely not the “see-finish” initial approach of Abike Dabiri. If Nigeria’s political class sustains verbal war with Kemi, the end loser is obvious; those who rush over to her “country” to treat ear and nose infections and use the opportunity to purchase condos worth thousands of Pounds. As UK’s opposition leader who has also led several sensitive government positions when her party was in power, she is definitely getting intelligence briefings as required, including on the dead with sticking toes, Nigerian leaders buried over there. And who knows her sustained antagonism to the ruling elite may just be the rude awakening the constantly London-patient-Nigerian leaders need to begin fixing things back home, especially if it is in her destiny to be PM. Imagine a UK PM who is irretrievably sold on picking stuff from the ground, as Lagos tough boys would describe the desire to really engage an antagonist (a ma jo mu nkan nile ni), with the Nigerian ruling elite who allegedly drove her out of Motherland through hardship only to become an average student in UK without the Nigerian communal support system, from being straight As student in Lagos (her claim for not being outstanding in academics in UK). Like Trump, maybe it is time someone of her status start demanding answers from leaders who consider their people too insignificant to demand accountability from them. The explanation South African Ramaphosa would not give to his own people at home; he became the Ibaka bird (Senegal canary) when Trump handled him at the Oval Office. Many African leaders deserve the Trump version of the WWE Smackdown. But wait, Kemi is a London-trained lawyer and engineer. Is it possible she didn’t check (which she can easily do on her mobile phone right before the commencement of the CNN interview) what the Nigerian Constitution says about citizenship or she deliberately did the Trump thing of evoking chaos to bring global attention to a thing?

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