Nigeria’s Vice President, Kashim Shettima, has urged Kemi Badenoch, the UK Conservative Party leader, who is of Yoruba to remove Kemi from her name if she was not proud to be a Nigerian, instead of denigrating her heritage and her country of ancestry.
Badenoch who spent part of her childhood in Lagos, had previously said that it was a city where “fear was everywhere”, The Telegraph of UK reported yesterday.
She has spoken frequently about the insecurity and corruption in the country and the experience of growing up under a military dictatorship.
But Shettima, Nigeria’s vice president, said that Badenoch “has every right to remove the Kemi from her name” if she was not “proud” to be from Nigeria.
He compared her to Rishi Sunak, her predecessor, adding: “Rishi Sunak, the former British prime minister, is originally from India. A very brilliant young man, he never denigrated his nation of ancestry nor poured venom on India.”
Sunak was born in Southampton to east African-born parents of Indian Punjabi descent.
Asked about the comments, Badenoch’s spokesman said on Wednesday that the Tory leader “stands by what she says” and that she is “not the PR for Nigeria”.
He added: “She tells the truth. She tells it like it is. She is not going to couch her words.”
Speaking during a trip to the US last week, Badenoch said: “I’m a child of the 80s. I was born in London, but I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria – a place where almost everything seemed broken.”
She added: “I watched my family become poor as their wealth, income and savings were inflated away by destructive government policies. They didn’t call it socialism – but it definitely was.
“Capital controls, no freedom of movement, government owning the means of production. There was no freedom either, the government deciding which school your child would go to, deciding what businesses could or could not operate all the way to arrests with no trial, state-sanctioned murder.”
It is unclear to which comments of Badenoch’s Shettima was referring in his speech on migration in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, The Telegraph said.
He added: “She is entitled to her own opinions; she has even every right to remove the Kemi from her name but that does not underscore the fact that the greatest black nation on earth is the nation called Nigeria.”
Badenoch was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in Wimbledon, south London, after her Nigerian parents travelled to the UK to receive private healthcare.
Her family then returned to Nigeria, before Badenoch returned in 1996 aged 16 to study A-Levels while working part time in a McDonald’s restaurant. She married her husband, an investment manager, Hamish Badenoch, in 2012.
