Nigeria Abroad
Kemi Badenoch, Nigerian-British Member of Parliament (MP) recently appointed Equalities Minister was at the centre of a colonialism row yesterday after WhatsApp messages in which she said she didn’t “care” about its impact on Africa were leaked.
She said those who lost out most during colonialism were “old elites” rather than the regular people, in messages handed to Vice News.
She added that the Europeans who went in “just made a different bunch of winners and losers,” adding, “there was never any concept of ‘rights.”’
The comments by the Saffron Walden MP, 40, were attacked by opposition politicians, with one MP saying they were “crass, divisive and painfully inaccurate.”
But Tory figures leapt to her defence, accusing her critics of bullying her for having views and opinions.
Peer Baroness Jenkin likened the situation to that of Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who decided not to attend her party conference next week after threats from trans rights activists.
“At a time when Rosie Duffield doesn’t feel safe to attend her party’s conference and yet another woman MP has come off Twitter because of abuse, what is with men who seemingly don’t like to see women doing well in politics? Let alone a Black woman who has faced extra challenges,” the peer tweeted.
Badenoch’s messages were handed to Vice by Funmi Adebayo, a former associate of the minister. She said she acted after Badenoch was promoted in last week’s reshuffle to a role involving the Foreign Office.
In them, Badenoch said: “I don’t care about colonialism because (I) know what we were doing before colonialism got there. They came in and just made a different bunch of winners and losers.
”There was never any concept of ‘rights,’ so people who lost out were old elites not everyday people.”
Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Labour MP for Streatham, told Vice: “For hundreds of years, the British Empire systematically underdeveloped and extracted resources from the global south. Blaming people for their own suffering and exploitation might be a tried and tested Tory tactic but it’s not actually what happened.”
