Kemi Badenoch bad-mouthing Nigeria is just an unintelligent political move. You have already won the Conservative Party leadership contest. You are now the party leader. Your position is secure. You do not need to schmooze the British establishment by disdaining your Black… pic.twitter.com/ZcZNBFDOlB
— Reno Omokri (@renoomokri) December 14, 2024
Kemi Badenoch bad-mouthing Nigeria is just an unintelligent political move. You have already won the Conservative Party leadership contest. You are now the party leader. Your position is secure. You do not need to schmooze the British establishment by disdaining your Black African roots, even if you are married to a White Briton.
You are the head of a party in opposition. You should be looking for votes. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. There are almost 300,000 Nigerians in the UK. Most of whom can vote. The figure is closer to a million when you add other sub-Saharan Africans.
Your party needs their votes because regular working-class White English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people are more likely to vote for a politician who looks like them than one who looks like Kemi Badenoch. It is a sad reality of British life that Rishi Sunak knew only too well.
The United Kingdom also needs the trade from their home nations. Nigeria grew at 3.46% this past quarter. Britain grew at only 0.1%. They need us more than Nigeria needs them.
Mrs. Badenoch’s best hopes are to espouse Conservative values, in order to retain the support of White upper class Britons, and not alienate the Black British vote by making snooty and condescending remarks about her fatherland and Black folks in general.
I mean, I don’t know if Mrs. Badenoch is aware of it, but she still has a Nigerian accent. It is not so thick. But it is there. You can detect it. Self-loathing will not remove it. And why should she even want to?
If I were a White Briton, my thinking would be: If she can throw her own kith and kin under the bus, imagine what she can do to us.
And Actually, she lied about Nigerian police officers being robbers. Yes, there are rotten eggs in the Nigerian Police, just as there are in the various British Police departments. But you cannot just generalise and tar everybody with the same brush.
In her book Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell said Black folks like to bear, exaggerate and propagate bad news. I thought she was being discriminatory and stereotyping our race. But now I am not so sure.
Those who watched her and were swayed by her rhetoric should have a rethink. In your encounter with the Nigerian Police, have you ever been robbed? You have most likely encountered more good police officers than bad. Yet, you choose to generalise by the behaviour of the few bad eggs rather than the overwhelming gallantry of the many good cops.
Do you think a foreigner watching this will listen to her and hate only the Nigerian Police? No. They will look at all of us the same way. Your value is linked to the value of Nigeria and its institutions.
Reno Omokri
