Every single Reform politician is currently wasting their broadcast rounds being bothered about Raheem Kassam’s characterisation of Kemi Badenoch as a ‘Nigerian scammer’, on the grounds that this is self-evidently a racist comment. In this article we’ll take both words in this phrase head on, proving both that Kemi Badenoch considers herself to be a first generation Nigerian immigrant and that she has misrepresented her biographical details for her own self-advancement.
With no further ado…
Nigerian
Kemi Badenoch was born in a private hospital in Wimbledon in London in January 1980. Her family flew back to Nigeria two weeks after she was born. It was common practice at this time for wealthy Nigerian families to have their children in the UK to secure permanent citizenship – a practice which largely ceased after the British Nationality Act of 1981 commenced – neither of Kemi’s younger siblings were born in London. Kemi moved to Britain when she was sixteen, she says that her family only realised around this time that she qualified for British citizenship.
Kemi has long denied that she is an ‘anchor baby’ but the fact remains that she spent most of her adolescence in Nigeria - her main formative years - and so it is reasonable to interrogate this aspect of her identity. Kemi herself said in her Maiden speech to the House of Commons in 2017:
‘To all intents and purposes, I am a first-generation immigrant. I was born in Wimbledon, but I grew up in Nigeria. I chose to make the United Kingdom my home.’
This speech was finally made after two separate failed attempts to break into Parliament. In 2010 she was selected to contest the seat of Dulwich and West Norwood. In her campaign literature from this time she explicitly referred to herself as being a Nigerian. Have a look at this post which she did on ‘Naijablog’ (Naija is an affectionate slang term for Nigeria).
Zooming in slightly closer:
“I am asking for your help now to support a Nigerian”. There it is in plain language, in her own words. When Kemi stood for Parliament, as Kemi Adegoke she described herself as a Nigerian, so why shouldn’t we?
NB: Remember that this political party is currently trying to campaign against ‘sectarianism’ vis Muslims voting for the Green Party.
‘Scammer’
Now, Kemi Badenoch has never called herself a scammer. But if we accept the definition of a scammer as being someone who serially deceives others for their own material gain we can see that this is a fair claim to make about her. Here, a non-exhaustive list:
Stanford University claim. Kemi claimed that she was offered a place at Stanford University Medical School at the age of sixteen for ‘Pre-Med’ because of her top test scores. Stanford University have made clear that this is not possible as it does not offer a pre-med degree. Kemi has continued to insist that she was indeed offered a place but that she has since lost the paperwork. John Reider, who was responsible for international admissions at Stanford at the time said:
“Although 30 years have passed, I would definitely remember if we had admitted a Nigerian student with any financial aid. The answer is that we did not do so.”“I assure you that we would not have admitted a student based on test scores alone, nor would we have mailed an invitation to apply to any overseas students based on test scores.”
It is also worth remembering that Badenoch got a D in A-Level maths (and two Bs, which casts doubt on the notion that she was a stunning academic success as an adolescent.She has also claimed that she suffered from the ‘poverty of low expectations’ as a sixth former in a college in London, and that black people like her were steered away from Oxbridge and towards vocational qualifications. Kemi was never going to be Oxbridge material with those dreadful grades (for any international readers, getting below a C in a British exam is consider a failure and means you are mind-bendingly stupid or lazy). The principle of Kemi Badenoch’s sixth form college denied that she was not given the right support and said it “just sounds like rhetoric to reinforce her political narrative”
Chess Grandmaster claim. Kemi claimed that she won a national chess champion at the age of seven. Nobody has any record of this happening and Kemi has never addressed it.
Claimed she was hit by a white woman for defending David Cameron. Kemi claimed in a Ted Talk that she spoke to a ‘sandal-wearing middle-aged white woman’ who had queried Cameron’s international aid policy.
‘Badenoch accused the woman of not really being interested in helping black people but rather using them as a weapon to fight her own enemy. Apparently, the woman…slapped her in the face and then ran off.’
Ashcroft (a sympathetic biographer being both a Tory Lord and Kemi lover) continues: ‘There is more than a hint of suspicion among some of Badenoch’s friends that she may have embroidered this tale…’Claimed to be a chartered Member of the British Computer Society. Kemi has claimed this in a few different places. Kemi’s career in IT after finishing University in 2003 was patchy and in terms of pure software engineering she spent less than three years working for Logica. To become a Chartered member (CITP) the expectation is upwards of eight years of IT professional experience including at a senior level. It is exceedingly unlikely that Kemi managed to become chartered in 2007 as she claims here, she has in recent years stopped claiming this and does not use the CITP credential in her name which she should be entitled to, instead she calls herself an ‘engineer’.
Claimed that she had to fetch water with rusty buckets as a child. Kemi made this claim in the House of Commons and has elsewhere told many tall tales about how difficult her childhood was materially, talking about taking a machete to school and doing her homework by candlelight. This is all complete nonsense. Badenoch went to the most expensive boarding school in Nigeria (International School Lagos) where the termly fees are many multiples of the average Nigerian’s salary. Her mother is a cousin of the former Vice-President of Nigeria and she spent much of her childhood travelling between Nigeria and the United States. Family members of the leading political dynasties in West African countries do not have to buy rice from Tesco.
Claimed that her parents would come to London to buy rice and take it back in the suitcase. In the Times ‘Whenever her mum came to visit London, she always returned home to Nigeria with her suitcase loaded with bags of Tesco Value rice.’ As above, this is deeply implausible given Badenoch’s class background. Her family spent time travelling between America and Nigeria. It doesn’t even make sense in its own terms. If her family were so poor that they were struggling to buy rice, what business did they have taking intercontinental flights between West Africa and the United Kingdom?
Claimed that her father was a GP. Kemi’s late father, Femi Adegoke, in fact owned and operated two clinics in Lagos and according to a family friend owned Iwosan Hospital in Surulere. He was also a leading Yoruba nationalist politician (you can see him speaking here). Kemi’s grandmother, Iya Ondo, was purportedly a wealthy Damask merchant. Her auntie was recruited from the United States to work in the Central Bank of Nigeria. As a former Minister of Foreign Affairs Bolaki Akinyemi put it:
”How can the daughter of a professor at UNILAG (University of Lagos)—her father was a medical doctor—a girl who went to the International School at UNILAG make it sound like she was selling groundnuts and water in Lagos in order to advance her political career?”Claimed that her driver was responsible for her being late. Kemi Badenoch was 21 minutes late to her first Cabinet meeting. She then blamed her driver for this.
Told the Times that Meloni had urged her not to form an alliance with Nigel Farage, more specifically to Steven Swinford with the words ‘be your own woman and stand your ground’. This page then temporarily disappeared from the Times website after Meloni’s aides said she had ‘never suggested to Badenoch that she should not ally with Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party’.
Claimed that she did not state that ‘maternity pay is excessive’. This is an interesting dynamic to Badenoch’s mistruths, her tendency being to double down even when she has been caught red-handed. During the Tory leadership race she said, on camera, what she thought of maternity pay and when these comments were seized upon – instead of apologising or recanting – she screamed and shouted about how she was being misinterpreted. ‘Contrary to what some have said. I clearly said the burden of regulation on business had gone too far…’
Claimed that she has mistyped when saying that migrant rape was a feminist issue. Badenoch posted that ‘Piddington [a village being flooded with migrants causing protests] is not an immigration issue, it’s a women’s issue’, and after receiving criticism said that it had been a typo (never mind that the sentence would make no sense and she states it should have been constituted). Again, Badenoch demands that you do not believe what you can see in front of you.
A liberally minded person might say that the offence of ‘Nigerian scammer’ comes from the stereotype of Nigerians being scammers. Two points here. First, as set out above, Kemi’s fellow Nigerians find her lies about her home circumstance disgusting. Second, the stereotype about Nigerian scam artists, or the wider perception that Nigerians can be dishonest, is a fulsome national stereotype which stretches beyond early 2000s internet scams and beyond even Europe and there is much more to it than just a lazy racist trope.
Across Africa Nigerians are known to be sly charmers (a joke in neighbouring countries is that Nigerians are so sneaky that they can steal the milk from your tea). It is not dissimilar to stereotypes about Irish people in Europe. A Ghanian would see Kemi making up things to brag about, then shouting at people when they correct her and conclude that she is a ‘true Naija girl’. By exposure they are immunised to her antics.
The only people in the world stupid enough to believe that Kemi Badenoch grew up in a mud hut with no running water live in Britain, and were born into it when it was 95%+ White. As somebody who grew up in a multicultural part of London, with lots of upper middle class first/second generation Nigerians like Kemi, I was immediately able to see through the brazen aggressive lying which is foreign to British culture. The same innocence which allowed her to exploit naive Tories with her lies is the same as the phantasmic spoils of illusory Nigerian ruby mines purloined many millions of dollars from naive American boomers logging onto Opera for the first time circa 2003.
I personally find Kemi’s adventuring amusing. I find her love of Michael Jackson, World of Warcraft, the TV shows Archer and Brooklyn-Nine-Nine intriguing and believe her precise flavouring of Millenial internet development, owing something to TheLonelyIsland is worthy of investigation. Failing that, I hope that one day she does what Arday did not and writes an interesting book about how she got away with it all for so long.
If Westminster politics were taking place in an alternative Universe where Britain had been denuded of its large economy and nuclear weapons I would be all for having Kemi be Prime Minister for a year or so for the amusement that would come with the spider web of lies collapsing in on her. As it stands, if there were an election tomorrow with Kemi as leader, I would urge readers to vote tactically against the Conservative Party. As well as taking on some of the entitlements like winter fuel and inheritance, the Labour party is a far better choice on immigration as it has substantially reduced legal and illegal migration.
What’s more Burnham is exceedingly unlikely to enter Britain into a war against China unlike Kemi, who will no doubt combine a full-throttle invasion of China with a robust deployment to the Sahel to defeat the dastardly Hausa in the field. If Kemi gets in and implements her ‘values immigration matrix’ we will see another vast wave of immigration from West Africa as no doubt points will be awarded on the grounds of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ and other such Intellectual Dork Web Sowellisms.
We are in the moment of maximum danger. The Tory press has given their party CPR whilst various spinners in CCHQ itself have duped some of the stupidest people to ever live into dividing the right-of-Tory-vote (‘I believe the White race could disappear if we lose in 2029, but you’ve also got to think about my mortgage as a young recently married man’) and there is a chance now therefore, however remote, that this woman could become PM.
Summon up the blood. Stand against her. Stand up for the truth!
So true