Where was Oyinbokemi?
Where was Oyinbokemi – Sam Omatseye-speak for Kemi Badenoch, the British Leader of the Opposition – when President Bola Tinubu was at Windsor, with First Lady Oluremi Tinubu, and the
- By Olakunle Abimbola
Where was Oyinbokemi – Sam Omatseye-speak for Kemi Badenoch, the British Leader of the Opposition – when President Bola Tinubu was at Windsor, with First Lady Oluremi Tinubu, and the entire Nigerian entourage, during that United Kingdom state visit?
Vice President Kashim Shettima, in cold wit, had baited Mrs. Badenoch: feel free to drop your “Nigerian” name, since you always rubbish your nativity! That stung deep, particularly that clincher: Rishi Sunak, after all, became British Prime Minister without vilifying his Indian ancestry!
That hurt Oyinbokemi deeply! With all her fancy education, the best riposte Badenoch could muster was preening Yoruba clannishness: Kemi is Yoruba, not Nigerian! See?
“Being Yoruba is my true identity,” the one born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke told The Spectator, a British newspaper, “and I refuse to be lumped with northern people of Nigeria, who were our enemies, all in the name of being called a Nigerian.”!
There you were: a cosmopolitan – British? – strain of Sunday Igboho and his Yoruba “Nesan” campaign?
Still, between Badenoch’s infra dig posturing towards Shettima – based on nothing but empty ethnic conceit from generational bigotry, unbefitting of any tempered mind – which of the two minds teems with cosmopolitan grace? Which oozes crudity from the cave?
All of these exchanges sparked in 2024. But back to the present: President Tinubu, guest of the British King and Queen on March 18 and 19.
As an authentic Yoruba girl, this saying should strike a chord in Badenoch: “Olorun maje kan fi mi s’awati, l’ojo iyi at’ogo mi” – May I never vanish, on my day of glory!
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Had Badenoch stayed gracefully – and gratefully – Nigerian as Sunak had stayed Indian, even while climbing the political ladder at Westminster, that royal visit could easily have been her story, as much as it was the Nigerian president’s.
Charles III bantered in Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo in royal bonhomie, at the state banquet. President Tinubu serenaded people of Nigerian heritage, shaping British life: Bukayo Saka and Eberechi Eze, both Arsenal forwards, boxer Anthony Joshua, former heavyweight champion of the world, etc.
Both the King and the President toasted many Nigerian-trained doctors that form the backbone of the British National Health Service (NHS); the definitive cuisine that is Nigerian Jolof rice; Afrobeats vibes that belt today’s UK airwaves and dancing halls; Nollywood films that pack the cinemas; and Nigerian banks and investors, now firmly – and proudly – part of the British financial and economic landscape.
Across the aisle, Kemi Badenoch should have topped the list of Nigerians greatly impacting British life today. A Nigerian on the cusp of being Prime Minister of the same Britain that colonized her country!
But neither the King – to whom she is Leader of the Loyal Opposition; nor the Nigerian president – who ought to have crowed over his country’s worthy export – muttered a word about her!
May I not vanish, on my day of glory!
But Badenoch did – vanished on her putative day of glory – no thanks to branding co-Nigerians “enemies” for no more than ethnic arrogance; and spewing the most virulent strain of self-loathing, in comic desperation to graft into another culture that would never fully accept her.
Besides, if the most polite gathering of your native country, and that of your adopted nation, gave you a wide berth, isn’t that a clear danger to your political ambition? That’s for introspective minds to chew! Oyinbokemi appears rather shallow in that deep zone, with her reflex to pillory her native land, for crass political gain!
That self-destruct impulse buoyed up again, after the president’s visit. To oppose Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s US-Israel-Iran war-time energy policy, Oyinbokemi launched into her favourite pastime.
“Energy is growth,” she wrote in a piece published in The Telegraph, a British newspaper, “I grew up in a country rich with oil, but because Nigeria’s leaders made bad policy choices, it suffered unreliable electricity and fuel shortages. Britain is now making similar mistakes.”
Even if that were true – and indeed they are notorious facts – what has that got to do with the nitty-gritty of British oil policy, beyond a reckless tongue sworn to virulent self-hate: bombing her very essence but feeling chic about it?
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Or was that peeved Badenoch grabbing public attention, after both courts, British and Nigerian, had ignored her at Windsor? Yet, more self-slaughter to come!
On March 25, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) declared slavery and trans-Atlantic slave trade among humanity’s most heinous crimes. It was a historic resolution that Ghana championed. Beyond her eternal Nigeria-carping, Badenoch’s take on the resolution brands her as a proud pariah to her Black race.
Britain and the rest of the slave-trading European ensemble – guilty as charged – abstained to cover their shame, though America, their monster son, under Donald Trump, arrogantly voted against the resolution, with Argentina and Israel. King Charles himself had carefully navigated that sensitive topic, without directly mentioning slavery in his banquet speech.
But Badenoch wouldn’t be Oyinbokemi if she did not barge in to defend her forebears’ enslavers!
“Britain led the fight to end slavery. Why didn’t Starmer’s representative vote against this? Ignorance or cowardice?” Kemi the Brit huffed! “We shouldn’t be paying for a crime we helped eradicate and still fight.”
We? Ignorance? Cowardice? It’s self-mockery writ large! But all is lost on Oyinbokemi!
The Yoruba say: You want the deaf to hear loud and clear? Belt it to the hearing of their children! So Shehu Sani, a former senator, gave Badenoch a stark reminder.
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“She came from an ethnic group in Nigeria whose ancestors were forcefully abducted and shipped to the Americas for slavery,” he wrote on X.
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“Millions died as a result of asphyxiation, dehydration, hunger and torture. The descendants of the slave masters agreed that their ancestors committed the ‘gravest crime against humanity’. She is intoxicated,” went the peppering clincher, “by the comfort of her adopted home. She opposed the UN reparations vote in order to please those who will never be pleased with her sycophancy.”
That hurts! Still, might Badenoch be so pathetically ignorant of her own painful history? Well, Sani, one of her northern “enemies”, just weighed in with a harsh tutorial!
Will the Brits, ever so tactful and sensitive, ever romp this tactless and insensitive one to head their government? We’ll see!
Oyinbokemi is the tragic tiger proclaiming its tigeritude – to borrow our own WS’s immortal quip.
But unlike the Leopold Sedar Senghor-led original that over-romanticized their Black skin, against White global racist onslaught, this one takes the cake in self-loathing. She wants to convince the Brits that her glistening blackness is indeed whiter than Whitehall and Westminster combined!
Good luck on that!
